UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 
AT   LOS  ANGELES 


This  book  is  DUE  u,.  ,„. 


SOUTHERN  BRANCH, 

UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA, 
LIBRARY, 
ANGELES.  CALIF. 


GERMANY  AND  ENGLAND 


GERMANY    AND 
ENGLAND 


BY  J.  A.  CRAMB,  M.A. 

LATE  PROFESSOR  OF  MODERN   HISTORY,  QUEEN'S  COLLEGE,  LONDON 


INTRODUCTION   BY  THE 

HON.  JOSEPH  H.  CHOATE 


43333 

NEW  YORK 

E.    P.   BUTTON    &   CO.,    PUBLISHERS 
1914 


COPYRIGHT,  1914 

BY 
E.  P.  BUTTON  &  COMPANY 


TEbc  ftnfcfecrbocfeer  press,  "Hew  JJorfc 


T>D 


INTRODUCTION 


\  THIS  little  book  is  one  that  every  American  should 

|  read,  because  it  is  not  only  a  gem  in  itself,  and 

worthy  to  be  placed  among  English  Classics  for 


its  clearness  of  thought  and  expression,  its  re- 
strained  eloquence,  and  its  broad  historical  knowl- 
edge,  but  because  it  explains  very  lucidly,  not 
the  occasion,  but  the  cause  (the  deep-seated  cause) 
of  the  present  war. 

£       The  occasion,  so  greedily  seized  upon  by  Ger- 

many, was  the  refusal  of  Servia  to  yield  to  the 

impossible  ultimatum  of  Austria.    Austria  and 

Servia,  and  the  loudly  proclaimed  racial  conflict 

i  between  Slav  and  Serb,  have  already  vanished 

1  5  from  the  scene  and  are  of  little  account  now.    The 

^  real  cause,  as  shown  by  Professor  Cramb,  is  the 

I  intense  hatred  of  Germany  for  England,  and  her 

C  lofty  ambition  to  establish  a  world  empire  upon 

C/>  the  ruins  of  the  British  Empire. 

Since  the  days  of  Frederick  the  Great,  while 
England,  largely  by  force  of  arms,  has  been  extend- 
ing her  imperial  power  all  over  the  world,  so  that, 
as  justly  described  by  Webster,  she  had  become 
"a  power  which  has  dotted  over  the  surface  of 
the  whole  globe  with  her  possessions  and  military 


vi  INTRODUCTION 

posts;  whose  morning  drum-beat,  following  the 
sun  and  keeping  company  with  the  hours,  circles 
the  earth  with  one  continuous  and  unbroken  strain 
of  the  martial  airs  of  England,"  Germany  has 
remained  cooped  up  within  her  narrow  boundaries, 
with  inadequate  access  to  the  sea,  and  without 
room  for  her  rapidly  increasing  population. 
"England's  mere  existence  as  an  Empire  has  be- 
come a  continuous  aggression"  to  Germany,  and 
her  proud  claim  to  be  mistress  of  the  seas  a  per- 
petual affront. 

Meanwhile,  Prussia,  under  the  lead  of  the 
Hohenzollerns,  has  become  the  master  of  all 
Germany,  and,  simultaneously  with  the  humilia- 
tion of  France  in  1870,  established  the  German 
Empire,  which,  however,  still  remains  an  inland 
empire.  But  all  the  while  she  has  been  building 
up,  quietly  but  steadily,  her  naval  and  military 
power,  so  as  to  be  ready  when  the  hour  should 
strike,  and  has  succeeded  in  creating,  in  her  army, 
a  military  machine  of  boundless  numbers  and  of 
almost  invincible  power,  to  cope  with  and  to  crush, 
if  possible,  the  combined  forces  of  all  the  other 
nations  of  Europe. 

Long  ago  Prussia  had  established  intellectual 
dominion  over  the  whole  of  Germany,  the  influence 
of  which  extended  among  all  nations.  In  this 
intellectual  progress  Germany  has  rendered  vast 
services  and  maintained  a  leadership  "in  all  the 
phases  and  departments  of  human  life  and  energy, 


INTRODUCTION  vii 

in  religion,  poetry,  science,  art,  politics,  and  social 
endeavor." 

Step  by  step  with  this  wonderful  development, 
Germany  has  cherished  what  Professor  Cramb 
designates  as  "a  dream  of  world  dominion,"  not 
simply  of  a  material  dominion,  but  of  a  spiritual 
one,  which  shall  make  the  German  mind,  the 
German  genius,  and  the  German  character  prevail 
over  all  the  world.  To  this  end  her  poets,  her 
orators,  her  historians,  her  publicists  and  poli- 
ticians have  been  for  the  last  forty  years  per- 
petually drilling  into  the  minds  and  hearts  of  the 
German  people,  of  all  classes  from  the  Kaiser  to 
the  peasant,  the  duty  and  the  necessity  of  achiev- 
ing this  lofty  and  mighty  ambition  for  their  great 
country.  And  they  have  been  biding  their  time, 
silently,  patiently,  conscientiously,  to  accomplish 
it  when  the  opportunity  should  come. 

But  there  was,  and  is,  one  insuperable  obstacle 
in  the  way  of  this  magnificent  dream  of  a  future 
world  empire  for  Germany,  and  that  is  the  accom- 
plished, existing,  actual  world  empire  of  Great 
Britain,  of  which  England  is  the  heart ;  and  unless 
this  obstacle  can  be  removed,  so  that  it  shall  never 
stand  in  the  way  again,  the  grand  ideal  of  Ger- 
many's future  can  never  be  realized. 

Professor  Cramb  attempts  to  give  a  description 
in  a  single  sentence  of  the  general  aim  of  British 
imperialism  as  it  exists  to-day,  in  these  words: 
"To  give  all  men  within  its  bounds  an  English 


viii  INTRODUCTION 

mind;  to  give  all  who  come  within  its  sway  the 
power  to  look  at  the  things  of  man's  life,  at  the 
past,  at  the  future,  from  the  standpoint  of  an 
Englishman;  to  diffuse  within  its  bounds  that 
high  tolerance  in  religion  which  has  marked  this 
empire  from  its  foundation;  that  reverence  yet 
boldness  before  the  mysteriousness  of  life  and 
death  characteristic  of  our  great  poets  and  our 
great  thinkers;  that  love  of  free  institutions,  that 
pursuit  of  an  ever-higher  justice  and  a  larger  free- 
dom which,  rightly  or  wrongly,  we  associate  with 
the  temper  and  character  of  our  race  wherever  it 
is  dominant  and  secure."  And  he  adds  "This 
conception  outlives  the  generations.  Like  an 
immortal  energy  it  links  age  to  age.  This  undy- 
ing spirit  is  the  true  England,  the  true  Britain, 
for  which  men  strive  and  suffer  in  every  zone  and 
in  every  era,  which  silently  controls  their  actions 
and  shapes  their  character  like  an  inward  fate — 
1  England. '  It  is  this  which  gives  hope  in  hopeless 
times,  imparting  its  immortal  vigor  to  the  states- 
man in  his  cabinet  and  to  the  soldier  in  the 
field." 

If  this  be  a  true  presentation  of  the  contest  now 
existing,  as  I  believe  it  to  be,  it  is  truly  an  imperial 
contest  between  the  German  Empire  of  the  future, 
that  is  to  be  won  only  by  war,  and  this  British 
Empire,  whose  chief  interest  now  and  in  all  the 
future  is  peace  throughout  the  world.  It  is  a 
life  and  death  struggle  between  two  mighty  powers, 


INTRODUCTION  ix 

each  entitled  to  the  respect  and  admiration  of  the 
onlooking  world. 

In  the  last  twenty  years  there  appear  to  have 
grown  up  in  the  German  mind  certain  ideas  about 
England,  which  have  no  foundation  in  truth  and 
which  are  now  being  tested,  with  a  startling  sur- 
prise to  Germany:  that  the  British  Empire  is 
ready  to  fall  to  pieces  of  its  own  weight  and  of  its 
own  age;  that  England,  having  tasted  the  sweets 
of  empire,  is  destined  to  give  way  and  Germany  to 
have  its  turn;  that  the  individual  Englishman  is 
degenerate  and  effeminate,  softened  by  luxury 
and  indulgence,  and  is  no  longer  a  fighter. 

Thus  it  appears  that  the  terrible  contest  is 
maintained  on  both  sides,  not  only  with  equal 
valor  and  with  equal  vigor,  but  with  equal  con- 
scientiousness and  equally  lofty  motives,  although 
the  object  of  one  is  to  destroy  and  of  the  other  to 
create.  The  world  looks  on  with  divided  sym- 
pathies, and  with  hope  or  doubt  as  to  the  result, 
according  to  such  sympathies.  Germany  has 
many  enemies,  but  England  is  "the  enemy  of 
enemies,"  the  only  one  that  counts  now;  and  so 
England  has  many  enemies,  but  Germany  to-day 
is  all  in  all  among  them. 

The  actual  conflict  has  gone  far  enough,  one 
would  think,  to  disabuse  Germany  of  some  of  its 
ideas  about  England.  Instead  of  her  empire  being 
ready  to  fall  to  pieces  by  the  dropping  off  of  her 
colonies,  armies  are  marching  to  her  aid  from  all 


x  INTRODUCTION 

her  dominions  beyond  the  seas,  apparently  ready 
to  fight  for  her  life  with  as  ardent  patriotism  as 
the  regular  British  soldier;  and  instead  of  any 
flinching  or  holding  back  on  the  part  of  the  individ- 
ual Englishman,  they  are  all,  to  a  man,  rushing  to 
the  support  of  the  colors,  or  already  engaged  in  the 
terrible  conflict  on  the  Aisne  and  the  Marne  with  a 
courage  worthy  of  the  field  of  Agincourt. 

Whereas  Germany  was  led  to  believe  that  the 
race  of  the  days  of  Cromwell  and  of  Milton  had 
passed  away  with  them,  it  now  reappears  upon  the 
scene  with  all  its  ancient  courage  and  virtue. 

There  is  no  disguising  the  fact  that  the  sym- 
pathies and  hopes  of  the  great  mass  of  English- 
speaking  people  everywhere  are  with  England 
and  her  allies  now,  although  America  is  still  a 
warm  and  faithful  friend  of  both  these  great 
nations,  and  pledged  to  absolute  neutrality. 

Germany  by  its  gross  and  admitted  violation  of 
all  treaties  in  its  hostile  entrance  upon  Belgian 
soil  was  first  in  the  field; — but  England  had  had 
full  warning  of  what  the  nature  of  the  coming 
contest  would  be,  to  which  her  Government  and 
people  might  well  have  given  more  instant  and 
constant  heed.  As  Professor  Cramb  shows,  at 
that  great  meeting  in  Albert  Hall  in  1900,  Lord 
Salisbury,  then  the  greatest  of  her  statesmen, 
gave  the  solemn  warning  to  his  people  "in  his 
appeal  to  Englishmen  to  arm  and  prepare  them- 
selves for  war,  for  a  war  which  may  be  on  them 


INTRODUCTION  xi 

at  any  hour,  a  war  for  their  very  existence  as  a 
nation  and  as  a  race."  And  Lord  Roberts,  the 
greatest  of  her  living  soldiers  to-day,  has  continual- 
ly repeated  the  same  admonition  for  the  past  eight 
years.  The  confident  expectation  of  Englishmen 
that  the  British  navy  would  always  be  her  all- 
sufficient  safeguard,  has  failed,  but  the  obstinate 
valor  of  her  soldiers  is  nobly  supplying  the  default. 
America  may  well  be  grateful  to  Professor 
Cramb,  whose  untimely  death  preceded  the  com- 
mencement of  the  war,  for  his  thrilling  explanation 
of  its  origin  and  cause,  and  we  have  much  to  learn 
from  his  serious  and  forceful  warning.  As  he 
very  clearly  explains,  what  is  now  going  on  is  a 
contest  for  the  empire  of  the  world,  and  we  have 
no  use  for  empire.  But  if  we  really  wish  for  peace 
against  all  hazards,  we  must  ever  strengthen  our 
navy,  and  train  every  youth  in  the  Republic,  as 
he  approaches  manhood,  to  such  extent  as  shall 
qualify  him  to  be  converted  into  an  efficient  soldier 
at  the  shortest  notice.  Whenever  war  has  come 
upon  us  in  the  past,  we  have  never  been  prepared 
for  it.  That  this  may  never  happen  again  is  my 
earnest  hope,  as  a  lifelong  lover  of  peace. 

JOSEPH  H.  CHOATE. 

STOCKBRIDGE, 
8  October,  1914. 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 

INTRODUCTION  BY  THE  HON.  JOSEPH  H.  CHOATE  V 

LECTURE  I 
THE  PROBLEM 

I.    ENGLISH  INDIFFERENCE  TO  GERMAN  HIS- 
TORY AND  LITERATURE       ...        I 
II.    SIGNIFICANCE  OF  "DEUTSCHLAND  UNO  DER 

NACHSTE  KRIEG"       ....        9 

III.  ORIGINS  OF  THE  ANTAGONISM   BETWEEN 

GERMANY  AND  ENGLAND      .         .  1 8 

IV.  THE  INDICTMENT  OF  THE  ENGLISH  EMPIRE      26 
V.    SHALL  A  GERMAN  EMPIRE  SUCCEED  IT?  36 

vi.    LORD  SALISBURY'S  WARNING    ...       39 

LECTURE  II 
PEACE  AND  WAR 

i.    ENGLAND'S  OFFERS  AND  GERMANY'S  RE- 
SPONSE    ......      46 

II.    THE  IDEAL  OF  PACIFICISM        ...      52 

xiii 


xiv  CONTENTS 

PAGE 

III.  CONCEPTIONS  OF  WAR  IN  THE  PAST    .           .  58 

IV.  THE  IDEAL  ELEMENT   IN  WAR  AND  IN  ENG- 

LAND'S WARS  FOR  EMPIRE    ...  62 

V.      VIEW  OF  WAR  IN  MODERN  GERMANY              .  70 

LECTURE  III 
TREITSCHKE    AND    YOUNG    GERMANY 

I.      HEINRICH  VON  TREITSCHKE      ...  75 

II.      HIS  REPRESENTATIVE  POSITION            .             .  78 

III.  TREITSCHKE,  MACAULAY,  AND  CARLYLE       .  82 

IV.  HIS  CAREER 87 

V.      HIS  INFLUENCE  AND  GOVERNING  IDEAS       .  98 

VI.      HIS    ATTITUDE    TOWARDS     ENGLAND     AND 

HER  EMPIRE        .            .            .            .            .  IO2 

LECTURE  IV 
PAST  AND  FUTURE 

I.      POSSIBILITY  OF  HISTORICAL  FORECASTS       .  IOQ 

II.       THE  DECLINE  AND  FALL  OF  EMPIRES             .  115 

III.  THE  PAST  OF  GERMANY,  AND  HER  EMPIRE 

IN  THE  FUTURE.            .            .             .             .  I2O 

IV.  NAPOLEONISM  IN  GERMANY        .             .            .  I3O 
V.      THE  ENGLISH  CONCEPTION  OF  EMPIRE           .  135 

VI.      THE  ISSUE  FOR  ENGLAND  .  .  .143 


GERMANY  AND 
ENGLAND 


LECTURE  I 

THE  PROBLEM 


THE  purpose  of  these  lectures  demands  perhaps 
at  the  outset  some  explanation.  First  of  all,  I 
disclaim  any  intention  to  provoke  or  foster  hostile 
feeling  between  Englishmen  and  Germans.  My 
aim,  rather,  is  to  contribute,  as  far  as  one  can 
by  encouragement  and  exhortation,  to  a  mutual 
understanding  between  those  of  the  two  countries 
whom  my  words  may  reach.  But  the  forces 
which  determine  the  actions  of  empires  and  great 
nations  are  deep  hidden  and  not  easily  affected 
by  words  or  even  by  feelings  of  hostility  or  friend- 
ship. They  lie  beyond  the  wishes  or  intentions 
of  the  individuals  composing  those  nations.  They 
may  even  be  contrary  to  those  wishes  and  those 
intentions.  Individual  friendship  or  hate  has  a 
very  fugitive  and  uncertain  influence  on  war  and 

i 


2  THE  PROBLEM 

peace;  and  the  good  or  evil  will,  even  of  great 
numbers  of  private  persons,  has  little  effect  on  the 
ultimate  motives  that  control  the  actions  of 
States.  It  may  be  questioned  whether  in  the 
twentieth  century  any  plebiscite  would  ever  be  in 
favour  of  war.  At  the  time  of  the  Fashoda  inci- 
dent there  were  probably  in  France  as  many 
individual  Frenchmen  who  entertained  kindly  feel- 
ings towards  individual  Englishmen  as  there  are 
private  persons  entertaining  such  feelings  to-day 
under  the  Entente  Cordiale ;  and  they  had  probably 
just  as  much  influence  on  the  reciprocal  relations 
of  the  two  governments.  The  history  of  the 
Republics  of  Hellas  and  of  Italy  is  but  a  large 
comment  on  this  theme.  You  may  study  its 
amplification  in  the  two  greatest  philosophic 
historians  of  all  time — Thucydides  and  Machia- 
velli.  Napoleon  understood  this.  "Politics  is 
Destiny,"  he  said  on  one  occasion.  "  La  politique, 
c'estlafatalite." 

What  then  is  my  purpose?  I  answer  in  the 
words  of  a  German  historian,  "To  see  things  as 
in  very  deed  they  are."  The  prayer  of  Ajax  in 
the  dire  extremity  of  the  Greeks  at  Troy  was  for 
light  that  he  might  see  his  enemy's  face.  It  is  a 
noble  prayer.  What  other  prayer  should  be 
England's  now? 

The  object,  therefore,  which  I  have  immediately 
in  view  is  to  stress  the  value,  if  not  the  necessity, 
to  Englishmen  of  a  deeper  understanding  of 


THE  NEED  OF  UNDERSTANDING        3 

Germany,  a  deeper  understanding  of  that  great 
nation's  political  temper,  its  history,  the  motives 
of  the  actors  who,  in  the  past,  have  seemed  to 
control  that  history;  the  development  of  its  insti- 
tutions and  its  laws,  its  poetry  and  its  literature — 
ever  the  highest  instructors  in  the  aspirations  of  a 
race1;  its  present  dreams  and  their  relations  to  its 
past  disillusionments  or  defeats.  For  in  the 
hf>tory  of  nations  there  is  a  Fate,  an  inexorable 
nexus  of  things,  which  constantly  arrests  and  con- 
stantly eludes  our  scrutiny,  making  the  sequence 
of  events  in  the  history  of  such  a  people  now  seem 
inevitable  as  some  dark  and  purposeful  drama, 
now  controlled  by  laws  more  akin  to  Nature  and 
the  elements  than  to  the  motives  of  human  action. 
Whether  we  regard  Germany  as  a  friend  or  as  a 
foe,  the  aims  and  ideals  of  that  nation,  some  ephem- 
eral, some  so  deeply  rooted  in  the  past  that  they 
are  beyond  the  power  of  the  present  to  modify, 
are  the  aims  and  ideals  which  must  singularly 
affect  England  in  the  present  and  are  likely  to  con- 

1  There  is  no  such  stainless  mirror  of  a  nation's  soul  as  German 
literature.  In  every  age  it  is  racy  of  German  earth,  going  the 
round  of  its  rivers  and  mountains  and  valleys.  In  the  thirteenth 
century  it  is  in  Thuringia,  the  feudal  castles;  in  the  sixteenth, 
Saxony  gives  its  tone  to  Reformation  literature  and  hymns;  the 
varied  art  of  Silesia  dominates  the  seventeenth,  as  that  of  Suabia 
the  eighteenth  century.  Romanticism  has  its  home  in  Berlin ;  the 
fatalism  of  Vienna  and  Munich  succeeds  "Young  Germany";  and 
in  the  twentieth  century  Berlin  again  leads  in  this,  one  of  the 
greatest  of  world-literatures. 


4  THE  PROBLEM 

tinue  to  effect  England,  beyond  those  of  any  other 
nation,  for  several  generations  to  come. 

If  Germany  is  our  enemy  of  enemies,  if  the 
twentieth  century  is  to  witness  such  a  conflict  for 
empire  as  that  of  England  against  France  in  the 
eighteenth  century,  or  against  Spain  in  the  six- 
teenth, what  is  more  imperative  than  that  we 
should  understand  the  spiritual  as  well  as  the 
material  resources  of  that  enemy,  than  that  we 
should  seek  to  discover  the  hidden  foundations 
of  its  strength  and  probe  the  most  secret  motives 
of  its  actions,  the  characterizing  traits  of  its  policy, 
the  deep  convictions  which  mould  the  history  of 
the  nation?  For  with  nations  as  with  individuals, 
it  is  character  that  counts;  he  that  wills  greatly, 
conquers  greatly. 

If,  on  the  other  hand,  Germany  is  to  be  Eng- 
land's friend,  perhaps  even  her  ally,  if  blood  indeed 
be  thicker  than  water,  then  perfect  mutual  un- 
derstanding, the  earnest  scrutiny  of  our.  separate 
aspirations  as  they  emerge  from  our  separate 
pasts,  can  only  strengthen  that  friendship  and 
render  that  alliance  more  enduring.  For  there  is 
no  surer  basis  of  friendship,  whether  between 
individuals  or  nations,  than  the  sympathy  that  is 
born  of  knowledge  and  the  knowledge  that,  in 
turn,  is  produced  by  sympathy. 

Yet  how  far  from  that  knowledge  and  how  in- 
different to  its  attainment  are  the  majority  of 
Englishmen  in  these  times!  Germany  has  one  of 


NEGLECT  OF  GERMAN  LITERATURE  5 

the  greatest  and  most  profound  schools  of  poetry 
— yet  how  many  Englishmen  have  the  secret  of 
its  high  places  or  access  to  its  templed  wonders? 
Since  the  decline  of  Alexandria  there  has  been  no 
such  group  of  daring  thinkers  as  those  of  Germany 
in  the  later  eighteenth  and  early  nineteenth  cen- 
turies; yet  to  most  English  men  and  women  the 
"Critique  of  Pure  Reason"  and  the  larger  version 
of  Hegel's  "Logic"  are  sealed  as  the  "Enneads" 
of  Plotinus. 

Merely  as  an  unexampled  opportunity  for  the 
study  of  the  soul  of  a  people  why  should  England 
neglect  this  literature?  Why  in  1913  should  the 
following  characteristic  incident  be  even  possible? 
A  few  weeks  ago  the  head  master  of  one  of  our 
public  schools  exhumed  a  letter  of  the  late  Mr. 
Gladstone,  in  which  that  eminent  politician  cast 
a  slur  upon  the  whole  of  German  literature,  de- 
nouncing the  author  of  "Faust"  and  of  "  Iphigenie ' ' 
as  an  immoral  writer  in  whose  works  we  find  vir- 
tue banished  and  self-indulgence  reigning.  Yet 
Goethe  is,  perhaps,  the  most  serene  artist  in  words 
since  Sophocles,  and  amongst  the  children  of  men 
not  one  has  striven  with  a  loftier  purpose  to  divine, 
even  though  darkly,  the  bond  of  the  Many  and 
the  One,  and  thus  to  justify  the  ways  of  God  to 
man  and  of  man  to  God.  That  in  the  welter  of 
literary  opinions,  published  and  unpublished,  of 
the  late  Mr.  Gladstone,  such  a  verdict  on  Goethe 
and  on  German  literature  should  exist  is  not 


6  THE  PROBLEM 

astonishing.  The  astonishing  thing  is  that  in  the 
second  decade  of  the  twentieth  century  an  English- 
man should  have  been  found  who,  having  exhumed 
such  a  verdict,  did  not  from  very  shame  instantly 
cover  it  again  in  complete  oblivion.  Instead  of 
this,  he  incontinently  published  it  in  the  "  Times," 
not  once  only,  but  in  two  different  issues.  The 
publication  of  this  letter  is  discreditable  at  once 
to  the  critic,  to  the  exhumer,  to  the  press  and  to 
the  nation. 

I  have  neither  the  wish  nor  the  hope  that  every 
Englishman  should  become  a  master  of  the  Ger- 
man language  and  a  learned  student  of  the  philo- 
sophy or  the  poetry  of  Germany,  its  history  or  its 
politics.  My  ambition  is  more  modest.  It  is 
the  hope  that  during  the  next  few  decades  there 
may  gradually  arise  here  in  England  a  wall,  as 
it  were,  of  cultured  opinion,  which  should  make 
the  blunt  enunciation  of  such  judgments  by  a 
prominent  politician  all  but  impossible  by  the 
ridicule  to  which  they  would  at  once  expose  him, 
and  their  ratification  by  the  head  master  of  one 
of  our  public  schools  absolutely  unthinkable. 

I  have  no  desire  to  labour  the  point,  but  it  is 
difficult  to  pass  in  silence  some  of  the  most  glaring 
instances  of  our  indifference  even  at  the  universi- 
ties to  German  history  and  therefore  to  German 
politics.  Not  a  page  of  Treitschke's  greatest 
work  has  been  translated;  yet  his  history  of  the 
first  stages  of  Prussia's  wrestle  for  supremacy, 


A  LITTLE  LEARNING  7 

his  literary  essays  and  his  lectures  on  political 
theory,  excite  a  more  ardent  curiosity  in  modern 
Germany  than  the  essays  and  the  history  of  Macau- 
lay  did  in  mid- Victorian  England.  Giesebrecht's 
great  history  of  the  early  Empire,  with  its  vivid 
portraiture  of  the  tragic  figures  of  the  Saxon  and 
the  Suabian  lines,  is  still  inaccessible  to  all  but  a 
small  minority  of  Englishmen;  and  its  companion 
work,  a  masterpiece  at  once  in  erudition  and  in 
thought,  as  well  as  one  of  the  most  alluring  of 
books,  the  "  Verfassungsgeschichte "  of  Georg 
Waitz — are  there  fifty  Englishmen  living  who  have 
turned  its  grave  and  weighty  pages  or  even  heard 
its  name?  It  would  be  easy  to  multiply  instances; 
for  German  scholarship  has, not  left  a  single  period 
in  its  annals  unillumined  by  some  work  which  is 
marked  by  distinction  or  power  and  yet  remains 
untranslated  into  English. 

Yet  of  Germany  beyond  most  nations  it  holds 
good  that  he  who  would  understand  its  present 
or  its  immediate  future  must  be  content  patiently 
to  search  for  the  key  to  its  hieroglyphics  in  the 
past;  and,  above  all,  he  who  would  estimate  at 
their  true  significance  the  regret  for  missed  op- 
portunities of  empire  and  the  hopes  of  redeeming 
those  opportunities  which  flit  before  the  imagina- 
tion of  thinkers  like  Treitschke,  or  soldiers  like 
Bernhardi,  must  feel  the  spell  which  the  shadowy 
grandeur  of  the  lost  empire  of  the  Ottonides  and 
the  Hohenstaufen  still  exercises  over  the  mind  of 


8  THE  PROBLEM 

every  German  not  sunk  in  sloth  or  chained  to 
self-interest. 

And  the  average  Englishman,  thus  denied  by 
his  ignorance  of  the  language  all  access  to  this 
deeper  knowledge — to  what  sources  of  information 
does  he  trust?  We  know  them  well.  There  is, 
for  instance,  the  Radical  member  of  Parliament 
who,  liberated  from  the  cares  of  State,  spends 
three  weeks  in  Berlin,  consorts  with  members  of 
the  Reichstag,  and  finds  each  and  all  of  them 
thoroughly  well-disposed  towards  peace  with  all 
men  and  with  England  in  particular.  What 
scaremongers  are  these,  he  asks  indignantly,  who 
talk  of  German  ambitions  or  a  German  invasion? 
Then  there  is  the  geographer  and  traveller  who 
spends  a 'somewhat  longer  period  in  the  towns  and 
villages  of  Brandenburg  and  West  and  East 
Prussia,  and  returns  aghast  at  the  intensity  of 
hate  which  he  found — at  what  he  describes  as 
"the  all  but  insane  desire  for  war  with  England" 
which  animates  every  class  of  society.  There  is, 
again,  the  statistician  who  enumerates  the  mileage 
of  German  railways  and  German  canals,  of  Berlin 
streets  and  Berlin  drains;  or,  again,  the  English 
officer  of  a  type  not  yet  obsolete,  who,  preparing 
for  the  Intelligence  Department  of  the  War  Office, 
spends  three  months  in  Germany  and  finds  in  it 
"a  nation  of  damned  professors." 

Thus,  seeking  reality,  we  find  only  appear- 
ance, and,  pursuing  knowledge,  we  gain  only 


PURPOSE  OF  THE  LECTURES  9 

opinions — Sdijai,  in  the  strictest  Greek  sense  of  that 
term. 

This,  then,  is  my  general  purpose  in  these 
lectures — to  consider  the  deep  strivings  of  German 
history;  to  understand  what  are  the  forces  which 
are  shaping  the  present  in  Germany,  forces  which 
lie  far  deeper  than  such  momentary  ebullitions 
of  goodwill  as  were  expressed  a  short  time  ago 
by  Admiral  Tirpitz.  These  are  but  things  of  a 
day.  It  is  in  the  past  of  Germany  that  we  must 
seek  the  real  springs  of  the  future  action  of  Ger- 
many, whether  that  future  be  against  England  or 
with  England. 

II 

DURING  the  last  few  months  there  has  been  in 
the  hands  of  a  large  number  of  Englishmen  and 
of  tens  of  thousands  of  Germans  a  very  remarkable 
book — a  book  which  has  sprung  from  those  deeper 
fountains  of  a  nation's  history  to  which  I  have 
referred.  It  is  a  book  written  in  German  by  a 
distinguished  cavalry  soldier,  General  von  Bern- 
hardi,  and  it  has  for  its  title  and  subject  matter 
"Germany  and  the  Next  War"-— "  Deutschland 
und  der  nachste  Krieg" — a  problematical  war, 
observe.  What  is  the  character  of  this  work? 

One  of  many  similar  books  which  during  the 
past  ten  or  twelve  years  have  been  widely  read 
in  Germany,  it  has  an  extraordinary  interest  for 
us,  and  an  interest  of  a  many-sided  kind.  It  is  a 


10  THE  PROBLEM 

fair  and  a  just  book — according  to  the  writer's 
insight;  soldier-like  in  its  simplicity,  soldier-like 
in  its  misdirected  literary  admirations.  It  has  a 
distinct  significance,  not  only  because  of  its  mili- 
tary criticism,  but  because  of  its  knowledge  of 
German  history  and  civilization;  for  General  von 
Bernhardi  is  something  of  a  scholar  as  well  as  a 
distinguished  soldier.1  Like  many  German  offi- 
cers, he  has  attempted  to  understand  not  only  his 
profession  as  a  soldier  but  the  "why"  of  that 
profession ;  studying  the  history,  the  literature,  the 
politics,  and  even  the  philosophy  of  his  nation, 
seeking  the  answer  to  the  question:  What  is 
Germany? 

And  by  "Germany"  he  understands  the  vital, 
onward-striving  force  flowing  in  German  blood 
from  an  endless  time  down  to  the  present,  and  from 
the  present  flowing  onwards  into  an  endless  future. 
What,  he  asks,  is  the  precise  value,  the  precise 
significance  of  that  force  in  its  present  mani- 
festation— "Germany"?  And  he  has  a  perfectly 
definite  answer:  It  is  strife;  it  is  war.  And  the 

1 1  have  selected  General  von  Bernhardi's  works  not  because 
of  any  peculiar  or  distinctive  value  in  them,  but  because,  of  all 
that  mass  of  literature  from  Treitschke  to  Delbriick,  Schmoller, 
and  Maurenbrecher,  they  are  the  sole  exemplars  in  Englishmen's 
hands.  For  the  rest,  "  Deutschland  und  der  nachste  Krieg, "  like 
Bernhardi's  earlier  writings,  is  characterized  by  a  certain  diffuse- 
ness.  He  is  a  reader  of  Nietzsche,  but  his  style  shows  not  a  trace 
of  that  master's  pointed  and  lucid  manner.  It  has,  however,  the 
merit  of  entire  sincerity. 


WHAT  IS  GERMANY  ?  11 

direction  of  that  strife?  It  is  the  isolation  of 
Russia  by  bribes;  the  destruction  of  the  antago- 
nistic force  named  France  beyond  the  power  of 
raising  her  head;  and  thereafter  Germany  will  be 
face  to  face  with  the  day  of  reckoning  with  England. 
"The  Hour"  to  which  German  officers  of  a  Chau- 
vinist tendency  drink,  will  then  have  struck. 

In  the  history  of  nations  we  must  count  time 
by  decades  or  even  by  centuries.  Under  change- 
ful moods  of  furious  declamatory  anger,  as  in  the 
crisis  of  the  Boer  War,  and  under  the  mood  of 
momentary  rapprochement  of  the  present  day  in 
the  crisis  of  the  reawakening  of  the  national  spirit 
in  France,  this  steady  thought  persists.  That  is 
one  interest  of  the  book.  There  is,  again,  the 
interest  which  centres  in  any  attempt  made  by  a 
German  to  explain  to  himself  England  and  Ger- 
many in  their  relations  to  one  another;  and  this 
is  one  of  the  underlying  thoughts  throughout  the 
book. 

Again,  the  book  has  the  interest  derived  from 
the  fact  that  it  represents  a  very  strong  trend  of 
German,  and,  above  all,  of  Prussian  opinion — that 
accumulating  mass  of  determined  anti-Englishism. 
It  is  useless  to  see  in  Bernhardi's  book  the  expres- 
sion of  a  morbid  or  heated  Jingoism.  It  is  no 
rhapsody  on  war.  Bernhardi  is  not  a  man  who 
takes  any  excessive  pleasure  in  the  contemplation 
of  war;  on  the  contrary!  But  he  is  a  man  who 
recognizes  those  darker,  obscurer  forces  shaping 


12  THE  PROBLEM 

the  destiny  of  nations.  To  him  this  war  with 
England  is  inevitable.  And  his  book  is  sympto- 
matic; that  is  to  say,  it  represents  the  mood,  the 
conviction,  the  fervent  faith,  of  thousands  and 
tens  of  thousands  of  Germans — Prussians,  Saxons, 
Suabians,  Bavarians. 

Its  philosophy  is  derived  from  Nietzsche  and 
Treitschke.  In  its  military  character  the  book  is, 
like  General  von  Bernhardi's  other  writings,  emi- 
nently up  to  date.  But  what  marks  out  this  work 
from  all  others  of  the  same  kind,  giving  it  some- 
thing of  the  distinction  of  a  really  epoch-making 
book,  is  that  it  represents  a  definite  attempt  made 
by  a  German  soldier  to  understand  not  merely 
how  Germany  could  make  war  upon  England  most 
effectively,  but  why  Germany  ought  to  make  war 
upon  England.  It  is  in  this  respect  that  the  book 
focuses  the  thoughts  of  many  German  writers, 
historians,  thinkers,  novelists,  pamphleteers,  who, 
again  and  again,  for  quite  the  last  forty  years, 
have  bent  their  attention  to  this  subject. 

Is  it  possible  to  find  any  moral,  any  ethical 
justification  for  a  war  upon  England?  The  war 
of  1870  with  France  was  a  war  of  great  revenge,  of 
just  revenge,  and  for  one  of  the  greatest  of  causes. 
No  war  in  history,  perhaps,  was  ever  more  just 
than  the  war  which  Bismarck  and  Moltke  waged 
against  France.  When  she  comes  to  this  war  upon 
England,  on  the  other  hand,  Germany  is  face  to 
face  with  the  difficulty  that  here  she  has  no  such 


GERMANY'S  INSTINCT  FOR  EMPIRE     13 

motive  of  retributive  justice  or  revenge.  And 
therefore  you  find  a  tendency  to  shape  the  question 
thus:  How  do  England  and  her  Empire  stand  in 
the  path  of  the  deepest  desires  and  ambitions,  and 
perhaps,  also,  the  highest  and  most  sacred  aspira- 
tions of  Germany? 

.  If  we  ask  what  those  desires,  ambitions,  and 
aspirations  are,  the  answer  is  this:  Germany,  not 
less  than  England,  it  is  contended,  is  dowered  with 
the  genius  for  empire,  that  power  in  a  race  which, 
like  genius  in  the  artist,  must  express  itself  or 
destroy  its  possessor.  An  empire  she  once  had, 
centuries  before  France  and  England  fought. 
That  empire  is  lost.  But  in  the  German  race  the 
instinct  for  empire  is  as  ancient  and  as  deeply 
rooted  as  it  is  in  the  English  race;  and  in  the 
Germany  of  the  present  time,  above  all,  this 
instinct,  by  reason  of  the  very  strength  of  Germany 
within  herself,  her  conscious  and  vital  energy,  her 
sense  of  deep  and  repressed  forces,  is  not  a  mere 
cloud  in  the  brain,  but  is  almost  an  imperious 
necessity.  This  is  the  real  driving-force  in  Ger- 
man politics,  the  essential  thing. 

Hence  the  further  question  which  young  Ger- 
many asks  is  the  question  which  Treitschke  asks: 
At  what  point  in  her  history  did  Germany  swerve 
from  the  path  to  empire?  Can  she  again  find 
that  path,  or  is  it  irrecoverably  lost?  Germany, 
from  her  own  inward  resources,  produces  year  by 
year  greater  surplus  energy,  mental  and  physical, 


14  THE  PROBLEM 

than  any  other  nation  in  the  world;  yet  year  by 
year,  by  emigration  to  America,  to  England,  and 
to  other  lands,  that  surplus  energy  is  lost  to  her. 
Year  by  year  are  we  to  look  on  in  impotent  anger 
or  in  apathy  whilst  the  best  and  most  enterprising 
of  our  citizens  quit  the  Fatherland  and,  living 
under  other  governments,  cease  to  be  Germans, 
bequeath  their  worth,  that  is  to  say  their  valour, 
to  those  nations  who  may  be  ultimately  Germany's 
deadliest  enemies? 

These  are  the  problems  which,  at  the  present 
hour,  press  in  upon  the  mind  of  every  thinking 
German.  They  have  been  the  study  of  serious 
historians  like  Oncken,  Treitschke,  Mommsen, 
Sybel,  even  of  Droysen.  They  are  the  questions 
which  find  their  answer  in  novelists,  poets,  publi- 
cists and  politicians.  Pamphleteers  like  Eisenhart 
and  Bley  here  agree  with  men  of  academic  rank 
like  Schmoller  and  Maurenbrecher,  Franke,  and 
Muller. 

And  the  answer  now  given  to  the  further  ques- 
tion, What  stands  in  the  way  of  those  desires  and 
aspirations?  is:  Germany  has  one  enemy.  One 
nation  blocks  the  way.  That  nation  is  England. 

Thirty  years  ago  this  answer  was  vague;  but 
since  that  period  it  has  steadily  grown  more 
distinct;  and  since  1898  and  the  formation  of  the 
Navy  League,  since  the  South  African  War  and 
the  extraordinary  outburst  of  political  and  per- 
sonal hatred  against  England  at  that  time,  it  has 


ENGLAND  BLOCKS  THE  WAY  15 

grown  still  more  precise.  Not  Russia  or  Austria, 
unless  secondarily,  not  France,  unless  incidentally, 
is  Germany's  enemy:  the  enemy  of  enemies  is 
England.  She  bars  the  way  to  the  realization  of 
all  that  is  highest  in  German  life. 

The  enemy  having  thus  been  ascertained,  the 
question  which  every  German  has  to  face  is :  Why 
are  we  to  submit  to  this? 

It  is  true  that  amongst  Germans  of  every  rank 
and  class  there  are  men  willing  to  acknowledge 
the  part  which  England  has  played  in  the  past, 
who  are  perfectly  willing  to  admire  our  Shake- 
speare, our  dramatists,  some  of  our  historians, 
and  are  even  willing  to  extend  a  kind  of  tolerant 
contempt  to  some  of  our  philosophers.  But  there 
are  Germans  of  another  kind,  men  of  the  type  of 
Eisenhart  and  Bley,  and,  above  all,  of  the  type  of 
Treitschke,  whose  attitude  towards  England  is  to- 
tally different.  These  men,  as  the  justification  for 
this  war,  this  "nachste  Krieg,"  point  to  the  broad 
fact — broad  enough,  assuredly! — that  the  English 
race  is  the  possessor,  "by  theft,"  as  Treitschke  de- 
scribed it,  of  one-fifth  of  the  habitable  globe.  And 
they  ask:  "By  what  right?  By  the  right  first  of 
craft,  then  of  violence!"1  German  indignation 
then  takes  the  place  of  German  analysis.  Cooped 
up  between  the  North  Sea  and  the  Danube,  the 

1  "In  1839,  in  the  midst  of  a  time  of  peace,  the  rock-nest  of 
Aden,  the  key  to  the  Red  Sea,  the  Gibraltar  of  the  East,  was 
•tolen."  (Treitschke's  "  Deutsche  Geschichte,  "vol.  V.,  p.  63.) 


16  THE  PROBLEM 

Rhine  and  the  plains  of  Poland,  conscious  of  our 
strength,  exerting  an  ever  stronger  pressure  upon 
our  frontiers — can  we  or  ought  we,  it  is  asked,  to 
acquiesce  in  England's  possession  of  one-fifth  of 
the  globe?  Ought  a  patriotic  German  to  submit  to 
seeing  his  nation  depleted  year  by  year?  Can  he, 
on  those  conditions,  retain  his  manhood  or  be  true 
to  the  religion  of  valour,  the  birthright  of  the 
Teutonic  kindred?  It  is  very  well  for  England  to 
protest  that  she  has  no  aggressive  designs  against 
Germany;  England's  mere  existence  as  an  empire 
is  a  continuous  aggression.  So  long  as  England,  the 
great  robber-State,  retains  her  booty,  the  spoils  of 
a  world,  what  right  has  she  to  expect  peace  from 
the  nations?  England  possesses  everything  and 
can  do  nothing.  Germany  possesses  nothing  and 
could  do  everything.  What  edict  then,  human 
or  divine,  enjoins  us  to  sit  still?  For  what  are 
England's  title-deeds,  and  by  what  laws  does  she 
justify  her  possession?  By  the  law  of  valour/ 
indeed,  but  also  by  opportunity,  treachery,  and 
violence. x 

1  It  is  impossible  in  Germany  to  ignore  the  force  of  literary  and 
academic  ideas.  Just  such  a  series  of  irrelevant  and  inflam- 
matory declamation,  partly  the  work  of  the  Tugendbund,  partly 
the  work  of  men  like  Arndt  and  even  Stein,  preceded  the  rising 
against  Napoleon;  and  in  a  later  decade  just  such  a  series  pre- 
ceded the  war  against  Austria  and  the  war  against  France.  The 
causes  of  the  wars  of  1866  and  1870  can  be  so  treated  as  to  appear 
the  work  of  professors  and  historians.  What  is  Droysen's 
"  History  "  but  a  pamphlet  in  six  volumes  in  which  Prussia  stands 


A  SHIFTED  QUESTION  17 

In  the  time  of  Roon  and  Moltke  the  attitude  of 
Germans  when  the  question  of  enmity  to  England 
was  discussed  was  always,  "Is  it  possible  to  land 
a  German  army  upon  English  soil?  And,  once 
landed  there,  how  is  it  possible  to  bring  it  safely 
back  again  with  its  plunder  to  the  shores  of  the 
Elbe  and  the  Rhine?"  What  was  argued  was  a 
problem  of  abstract  strategy,  rather  than  of 
political  or  national  aim. 

A  generation  has  passed.  The  heroes  of  the 
war  of  1870  have  one  by  one  disappeared — Bis- 
marck, Roon,  Moltke,  Manteuffel.  That  prob- 
lem of  strategy  does  still  exist  in  Germany,  but 
it  occupies  a  much  less  prominent  place  than  it 
occupied  thirty  or  forty  years  ago.  It  seems  to 
have  solved  itself  during  the  last  ten  or  fifteen 
years.  It  has  become  a  secondary  matter,  and 
the  quasi-historical  form  which  the  question  of 
enmity  to  England  now  assumes  in  the  minds  of 
thousands  of  intellectual  Germans  is  this:  As  the 
first  great  united  action  of  the  Germans  as  a 
people,  when  they  became  conscious  of  their 
power,  was  the  overthrow  of  the  Roman  Empire, 
and  ultimately,  in  Charlemagne  and  the  Ottonides, 
the  realization  of  the  dream  of  Alaric — the  trans- 
figuration of  the  world,  the  subversion  of  Rome, 


out  as  the  model  State?  And  the  "  French  Revolution  "  of  Sybel 
is  a  counterpart  of  the  writings  of  Droysen  and  Treitschke  in  its 
arraignment  of  the  French  nation. 


1 8  THE  PROBLEM 

and  the  erection  upon  its  ruins  of  a  new  State;  so, 
in  the  twentieth  century,  now  that  Germany  under 
the  Hohenzollern  has  become  conscious  of  her 
new  life,  shall  her  first  great  action  be  the  over- 
throw of  that  empire  most  corresponding  to  the 
Roman  Empire,  which  in  the  dawn  of  her  history 
she  overthrew?  In  German  history  the  old 
Imperialism  begins  by  the  destruction  of  Rome. 
Will  the  new  Imperialism  begin  by  the  destruction 
of  England? 

Ill 

THE  ethico-political  or  moral  origins  of  the 
sentiment  of  antagonism  between  England  and 
Germany  are  thus  obvious  enough — the  confron- 
tation of  two  States,  each  dowered  with  the  genius 
for  empire;  the  one,  the  elder,  already  sated  with 
the  experience  and  the  glories  of  empire;  the  other, 
the  younger,  apparently  exhaustless  in  resources 
and  energy,  baulked  in  mid-career  by  "fate  and 
metaphysical  aid,"  and  now  indignant. 

This  is  the  moral,  the  most  profound  source  of 
antagonism;  and  its  roots  lie  deep  in  European 
history — German  historians  as  widely  apart  in 
mind  as  Hegel  and  Treitschke  seeing  the  cause  of 
Germany's  frustrate  destiny  in  her  pursuit  of 
ideal  ends,  of  "the  freedom  of  the  spirit";  in  her 
deep  absorption  in  religion  at  the  period  when 
England,  Holland,  France,  Spain,  fired  by  com- 


RELATIONS  WITH   PRUSSIA  19 

mercialism,  played  against  each  other  for  the 
dominion  of  this  planet.  This  is  clear:  this  is  the 
ethical,  the  permanent  and  the  real  cause.  It  has 
the  characteristics  of  all  true  causes:  universality 
and  necessity.  And  it  is  worth  while  pausing  at 
this  point  to  ask  the  question :  What  is  its  historical 
genesis? 

The  unity  of  modern  Germany  is  the  work  of 
Prussia  and  the  great  Hohenzollern  dynasty. 
WTiat  are  the  stages  in  the  evolution  of  the  rela- 
tions between  England  and  Prussia?  There  are 
four  distinct  phases:  the  period  of  Frederick  the 
Great,  the  Napoleonic,  the  mid-nineteenth  century 
and  the  later  nineteenth  century. 

The  definite  relations  of  England  and  Prussia 
as  State  to  State  are  synchronous  with  the  history 
of  Prussia  as  a  kingdom;  and  in  the  first  decades 
the  terms  are  those  of  friendship.  The  son  of  the 
Great  Elector,  Frederick  I,  as  first  King  of  Prussia, 
sends  his  contingent  to  support  Marlborough  and 
Eugene.  During  Frederick  the  Great's  time,  Eng- 
land's relations  to  Prussia,  beginning  in  hostility, 
owing  to  the  sympathy  of  the  English  people 
for  Maria  Theresa,  and  their  enmity  to  France, 
pass  through  a  phase  of  variegated  sullen  friend- 
ship and  alliance,  and  end  again,  at  least  on 
Frederick's  part,  in  clear  burning  hostility  and 
contempt  when  the  government  of  Lord  Bute 
abandons  Prussia.  Minor  German  historians  have 
dwelt  much  on  1762  and  the  "betrayal"  of 


20  THE  PROBLEM 

Frederick  by  the  Cabinet  of  St.  James's  in  the 
hour  of  his  darkest  fortunes.1  Frederick,  in  his 
correspondence  on  the  subject,  does  not  spare  the 
character  of  Lord  Bute;  but  he  is  too  profound 
an  observer  of  the  life  of  States,  and  too  frequent 
a  student  of  "II  Principe"  and,  above  all,  of 
"Gli-Discorsi,"  not  to  know  that  alliances  between 
States  are  based  on  self-interest. 

A  generation  passes.  At  the  time  of  the  Revo- 
lutionary and  Napoleonic  wars,  England  is  for 
nearly  eight  years  the  enemy  of  Prussia,  the  enemy, 
that  is  to  say,  of  Napoleon's  ally,  or  Napoleon's 
tributary  State.  Then  in  1813,  1814,  and  1815, 
England  stands  side  by  side  with  Prussia,  and 
this  friendship  is  not  interrupted  during  the  Holy 
Alliance,  though  it  is  easy  to  trace  distrust  and 
misgiving  in  the  attitude  of  actual  Prussians  or  of 
"nationalized"  Prussians,  Prussians  by  sympathy 
like  Niebuhr  and  Stein.  These  die.  "  They  see," 
I  have  elsewhere  said,  "the  world  rushing  upon 
ruin;  they  see  the  unchaining  of  anarchy.  But 
what  do  they  hope  from  England?  England, 
faster  than  all  the  rest,  is  plunging  down  the  steep." 

With  the  Revolution  of  February,  1848,  with 
1870  and  1875,  it  is  possible  already  to  discern  the 

'.The  "Annual  Register,"  which  began  in  1758,  is,  in  its  first 
numbers,  full  of  proofs  of  the  admiration  felt  by  England  for 
the  King  of  Prussia.  The  Buckingham  Correspondence  indicates 
that  Frederick's  proud  hostility  was  not  to  the  nation,  but  to 
Bute. 


RISE  AND  TRIUMPH  OF  PRUSSIA     21 

rise  of  the  present  hostility.  And  the  underlying 
cause,  the  causa  causans?  It  is  interesting;  it  is 
curious;  it  presents  one  of  those  movements,  one 
of  those  visible  invisible  "curves"  traced  in  the 
Unseen,  which  in  history  affect  the  imagination 
like  the  great  achievements  in  art.  The  workshop 
is  flung  open;  we  seem  to  witness  the  very  opera- 
tion of  Fate;  the  Norns  are  weaving  the  destinies 
of  men. 

This  causa  causans  is  not  England.  England 
is  passive.  The  active  agent  is  Prussia.  Stage 
by  stage  from  the  days  of  the  Great  Elector  Prussia 
has  risen,  guarding  each  advance  with  a  Roman 
precision  and  care.  Under  her  first  two  kings, 
Frederick  I  and  Frederick  William  I,  as  under 
the  Great  Elector,  Prussia  is  admirable  in  her 
self-restraint.  Her  aim  is  to  secure  the  territory 
extorted  from  the  Swedes  at  Fehrbellin  and  to 
organize  the  new  kingdom.  She  does  not  as  yet 
even  come  forward  as  Austria's  antagonist, 
despite  ultra-Habsburg  treachery,  ultra-Habsburg 
insolence. 

Prussia  strikes  when  her  hour  strikes,  and  in 
1740,  with  the  accession  of  Frederick  the  Great, 
that  hour  does  strike;  and  for  the  next  twenty- 
three  years  Prussia  appears  as  the  great  rebel- 
State,  asserting  herself  triumphantly,  measuring 
herself  in  battle  after  battle  against  Austria  and 
Austria's  allies.  All  Europe  cannot  break  her 
spirit  or  the  spirit  of  her  king. 


22  THE  PROBLEM 

It  is  one  of  the  lofty  and  exhilarating  heroisms 
of  world-history,  this  conflict  of  reality  against 
empty  formalism;  of  the  substance  of  Frederick's 
military  State  against  that  phantom,  the  Army  of 
the  Empire;  of  right  and  strength  against  boastful 
weakness  parading  as  power,  unrighteous  privi- 
lege decking  itself  with  the  sanctity  of  history  and 
right. ' 

Nothing  is  more  merciless  than  Frederick's 
mockery  of  that  venerable  myth,  the  Holy  Roman 
Empire.  We  hear  already  Frosch's  song  in 
"Faust": 

"  Das  liebe,  heil'ge,  Rom'sche  Reich 
Wie  halt's  nur  noch  zusammen?" 

If  the  conflict  at  times  is  tragic,  as  in  1759  it 
becomes  tragic,  it  is  always  heroic  tragedy. 
Frederick's  poetry  before  Rossbach  moves  us  as 
the  midnight  talk  of  Achilles  and  Priam — the 
sorrow  and  the  heroism  in  things: 

'Pour  moi,  menac£  du  naufrage, 
Je  dois,  en  affrontant  1'orage, 
Penser,  vivre  et  mourir  en  roi. " 


1  "His  statecraft  bears  on  its  face  the  stamp  of  his  own  kingly 
frankness.  In  the  conflicts  of  States  he  had  regard  only  for 
living  things,  for  power  skilfully  utilized  through  rapid  action. 
He  gave  truth  once  more  a  place  of  honour  in  German  politics. " 
(Treitschke's  "  Deutsche  Geschichte,"  vol.  I.,  pp.  49-50.) 


THE  WAR  OF  LIBERATION  23 

And  again  we  have  at  once  to  admire  Prussia's 
irresistible  and  resolute  advance  and  her  strict  re- 
straint. Definitely  she  comes  forward  as  Austria's 
rival;  but  the  hour  for  Austria's  overthrow  has 
not  yet  come.  Frederick's  army  and  the  entrain 
of  success  might  have  led,  after  1763,  into  wars 
for  world-empire  which  would  have  recalled  those 
of  Louis  XIV  and  anticipated  those  of  Napoleon. 
The  king  is  not  yet  old — the  age  of  Maryborough 
at  Blenheim,  of  Caesar  at  Munda.  In  Treitschke's 
theory,  Frederick  is  conscious  in  himself  of  mili- 
tary genius  like  that  of  Alexander,  yet  is  con- 
tent with  Prussia.  Even  when  such  men  as 
Winterfelt  or  Dessau  propose  the  Empire,  he 
answers  them:  "No;  it  would  be  too  awkward  a 
burden." 

Two  generations  pass.  The  War  of  Liberation 
follows,  investing  Prussia  with  a  glory  such  as  the 
war  against  Xerxes  gave  Athens.  Blucher,  Stein, 
Gneisenau,  Scharnhorst,  Arndt,  Korner,  Fichte, 
Kleist,  Uhland,  form  a  galaxy  of  heroism  on 
which,  between  1815  and  1848,  the  imagination  of 
Young  Germany  broods  not  less  ardently  than,  in 
an  earlier  generation,  the  contemporaries  of  Goethe 
and  Herder  had  studied  in  Plutarch  the  heroic 
phantoms  of  Greece  and  of  Rome.  Then,  when 
a  century  has  passed  since  Frederick's  wars,  the 
task  which,  greatly  daring,  he  declined,  Prussia, 
greatly,  wisely  daring,  now  can  undertake.  The 
hour  has  once  more  struck.  And  at  Sadowa  and 


24  THE  PROBLEM 

at  Metz,  Worth  and  Sedan,  she  founds  the  new 
German  nation  and  the  new  German  empire. I 

What  is  to  be  the  next  stage?  Germany  after 
1870  finds  a  greater  strength  and  a  sense  of  more 
complicated  and  intricate  unity  than  she  ever 
possessed  in  the  days  of  mediasval  Imperialism; 
and  in  the  House  of  Hohenzollern  the  new  nation 
has  found,  in  answer  to  all  its  aspirations,  a  dynasty 
not  less  heroic,  not  less  great  than  the  Ottonides 
or  even  the  Hohenstaufen. 

Now  it  is  just  at  this  moment  in  her  history  that 
Germany  comes  sharp  up  against  England,  as  in 
the  eighteenth  century  she  comes  up  against 
Austria,  and  in  the  nineteenth  against  France. 
Yet  in  her  past  relations  to  England,  Prussia,  it 
may  seem  at  first,  can  find  no  cause,  personal  and 
rancorous,  such  as  animates  her  in  1760  or  in 
1870.  From  Austria  and  from  France  she  had 
endured  insult  upon  insult,  measureless  humilia- 
tions. But  from  England? 

England's  possessions,  England's  arrogance  on 
the  seas,  her  claim  to  world-wide  empire — these, 
Germany  answers,  are  to  Germany  an  insult  not 
less  humiliating  than  any  she  has  met  with  in 
her  past.  And  what  are  these  English  preten- 
sions? And  upon  what  are  they  based?  Not 
upon  England's  supremacy  in  character  or  intel- 

1  Bismarck  now  is  not  content  with  Prussia;  he  is  for  empire, 
though  again  temperate — "I  wish  to  be  an  honest  broker." 


ENGLAND'S  BASELESS  SUPREMACY      25 

lect.  For  what  is  the  character  of  this  race  which 
thus  possesses  a  fifth  of  the  habitable  globe  and 
stands  for  ever  in  the  path  of  Germany's  course 
towards  her  "place  in  the  sun,"  in  the  path  of 
Germany's  course  towards  empire? 

It  is  from  this  first  recrimination  that,  during 
the  last  three  or  four  decades,  largely  under  the 
influence  of  the  Prussian  School  of  History,  there 
has  been  evolved  a  portrait  of  England  as  the 
great  robber-State.  In  one  phase  or  another  this 
conception  is  gradually  permeating  all  classes, 
making  itself  apparent  now  in  a  character  in 
fiction,  now  in  a  poem,  now  in  a  work  of  history 
or  economics,  now  in  the  lecture-hall  at  Bonn  or 
Heidelberg  or  Berlin,  now  in  a  political  speech. 

And  the  theme  is  precise.  England's  suprem- 
acy is  an  unreality,  her  political  power  is  as 
hollow  as  her  moral  virtues;  the  one  an  arrogance 
and  pretence,  the  other  hypocrisy.  She  cannot 
long  maintain  that  baseless  supremacy.  On  the 
sea  she  is  rapidly  being  approached  by  other 
Powers;  her  resources,  except  by  immigration, 
are  almost  stationary,  and  her  very  immigration 
debases  still  further  her  resources.  Her  decline 
is  certain.  There  may  be  no  war.  The  display 
of  power  may  be  enough,  and  England  after  1900, 
like  Venice  after  1500,  will  gradually  atrophy, 
sunk  in  torpor.  An  England  insensibly  weakened 
by  brutalization  within  and  the  encroachments 
of  an  ever-increasing  alien  element,  diseased  or 


26  THE  PROBLEM 

criminal,  and,  by  concession  on  concession  with- 
out, sinking  into  a  subject  province  though  nomi- 
nally free,  whilst  Canada,  South  Africa,  Australia, 
New  Zealand,  carves  out  each  its  own  destiny — 
such  an  England  is  easily  conceived. 

Who  is  to  succeed  her?  It  may  not  be  Ger- 
many; some  Power  it  must  be.  But  if  Germany 
were  to  inherit  the  sceptre  which  is  falling  from 
her  nerveless  hands  .  .  .  ? 

And,  having  visualized  this  future,  the  German 
imagination,  in  a  tempest  of  envy  or  vehement 
hate,  becomes  articulate  and  takes  various  shapes, 
resulting  in  an  almost  complete  arraignment  of 
the  British  Empire,  of  the  English  character,  and 
of  all  our  institutions  and  all  our  efforts  as  an 
empire-building  race. 


IV 


FIRST  there  is  the  general  indictment  of  British 
Imperialism  as  an  influence  upon  humanity.  You 
acquired  your  empire,  these  critics  say,  by  meas- 
ureless treachery,  violence,  the  perfidious  foment- 
ing of  strife,  and  you  have  failed  as  an  empire  at 
once  in  your  colonies  and  in  your  dependencies. 
Your  colonies  already  shiver  with  impatience  under 
the  last  slight  remnant  of  your  yoke.  The  arro- 
gance or  the  clumsiness  of  some  beef-witted  minis- 
ter will  alienate  Canada  or  Australia  exactly  as 
the  clumsiness  of  the  Graftons,  the  Norths,  the 


AN  ARRAIGNMENT  27 

Grenvilles,  between  1763  and  1775,  alienated  the 
New  England  States. 

Then  the  German  Cultur-Imperialisten,  not  un- 
affected probably  by  the  study  of  Mommsen  or  of 
Curtius,  certainly  strongly  influenced  by  the  study 
of  Dahn  and  Nietzsche,  arraign  the  century  and  a 
half  of  our  rule  in  India.  "Your  dominion,"  they 
say,  "has  been  retrograde  and  obscurantist.  India 
is  not  only  the  Italy  of  Asia ;  it  is  not  only  the  land 
of  romance,  of  art  and  beauty.  It  is  in  religion 
earth's  central  shrine.  India  is  religion.  Yet 
what  consciousness  of  this  have  Englishmen  ever 
exhibited?  You  came  to  India  with  an  opium 
pipe  in  one  hand  and  a  Bible  in  the  other.  India, 
seeking  dreams,  accepted  with  the  passion  of  de- 
spair the  opium ;  it  gave  her  dreams.  Your  Bible 
she  rejected  with  measureless  contempt,  and  she 
awoke  from  her  opium  sleep  to  fasten  her  eyes  and 
her  soul  with  new  ardour,  new  adoration,  on  the 
great  scriptures  of  her  race.  Yet  the  officers  of 
your  army  and  your  civil  administrators  are  in- 
capable of  reading  a  page  of  those  scriptures. 
Instead  of  seizing  the  opportunity  of  a  new  and 
great  religious  experiment,  you,  the  conquerors — 
borrowers  of  your  own  religion — have  come  to  the 
most  original  race  of  this  planet  and  asked  them 
to  borrow  from  the  borrowers ! 

"With  what  contempt  for  the  conquerors  must 
not  the  Brahmin,  sunk  in  the  studies  of  those  vast 
and  austere  conceptions  which  by  the  vanished 


28  THE  PROBLEM 

stream  of  the  Saraswati  first  allured  the  human 
soul,  rise  at  midnight  from  his  studies  and,  as  he 
walks  to  and  fro  under  the  stars,  console  himself 
for  his  lost  nationality  by  pondering  the  problem, 
poignant  in  its  sarcasm  as  in  its  pathos:  Which  is 
the  greater  humiliation  to  a  race,  to  be  indebted 
to  another  for  its  government  or  to  be  indebted  to 
another  for  its  religion?  Germany,  on  the  other 
hand,  is  year  by  year  preparing  to  make  this  great 
religious  experiment.  The  development  of  German 
thought,  from  Kant  to  Fichte,  from  Hegel  and 
Schopenhauer  to  Lotze,  Hartmann  and  Nietzsche, 
strives  to  no  other  term. 

"Thus  in  the  spheres  of  religion  and  of  thought 
you  have  failed  to  impress  your  dominion  upon  the 
Hindu  imagination:  the  seed-fields  of  that  failure 
are  rolling  on  to  the  harvest.  The  verses  of  one  of 
your  own  poets,  pointless  when  applied  to  Rome 
and  Egypt,  acquire  a  bitter  meaning  when  applied 
to  England  and  India  as  but  yesterday  they  were 
applied  by  one  of  Ramakrishna's  disciples  educated 
in  England : 

'"The  East  bowed  low  before  the  blast 
In  patient,  deep  disdain, 
She  let  the  legions  thunder  past 
And  plunged  in  thought  again. ' 

"Nevertheless,  though  thus  failing  in  religion, 
you  might  have  succeeded  as  Consular  Rome  suc- 
ceeded in  Hellas.  Failing  to  impress  your  domin- 
ion on  India  by  sovereignty  of  mind  or  by  the 


ENGLAND'S  FAILURE  IN  INDIA         29 

daring  of  speculative  thought,  you  might  still  have 
impressed  the  imagination  of  the  Hindu  by  your 
valour  and  by  your  organized  strength  in  war. 
To  the  three  hundred  millions  of  Hindus  you 
might  have  presented  yourselves  as  a  great  Kshat- 
riya  race,  a  nation  of  warriors.  Instead  of  this  you 
attempt  to  hold  India  with  almost  fewer  legions 
than  Rome  required  to  govern  the  original  de- 
spicable race  of  Britannia.  You  invite  hundreds  of 
young  Hindus  of  ancient  lineage  to  your  universi- 
ties and  to  your  schools.  With  what  feelings  must 
they  read  the  tirades  against  a  Nation  in  Arms, 
the  litanies  in  praise  of  peace,  which  argue  the 
slave  and  the  coward  at  heart !  Instead  of  a  nation 
of  Kshatriyas  you  appear  as  a  nation  of  Vaisyas — 
a  nation  of  shopkeepers  indeed !  You  alone  of  the 
nations  of  Europe  in  the  twentieth  century  still 
possess  a  mercenary  army!  Only  at  one  period 
of  your  history,  Treitschke  affirms,  did  you  ever 
possess  a  national  army,  and  that  was  in  the  time 
of  Cromwell.1  When  Englishmen  ceased  to  be 
soldiers  they  forfeited  their  right  to  govern  India 
in  perpetuity. 

"Thus  in  India  you  have  failed  conspicuously, 
ignobly  and  completely,  because  as  a  government 
and  as  a  nation  you  have  lost,  if  you  ever  possessed 
them,  the  three  qualities  revered  by  the  Hindu 
race — creative  genius  in  religion,  the  valour  in 
arms  of  a  military  caste,  and  the  pride  of  birth  of 

*  Treitschke's  "Politik,"  vol.  II.,  p.  358. 


30  THE  PROBLEM 

the  rajah.  But  chiefly  you  have  failed  because  you 
have  ceased  to  be  soldiers ;  because  you  dread  war ; 
because  you  present  to  the  whole  world  the  spec- 
tacle which  the  world  has  not  seen  since  the  fall  of 
the  Byzantine  Empire — a  timorous,  craven  nation 
trusting  to  its  fleet. 

"And  as  you  have  failed  in  India,  so  you  will  fail 
in  Egypt,  which,  next  to  India,  is  the  most  sacred 
region  on  this  earth.  As  yet  you  have  succeeded 
only  in  vulgarizing  it.  The  Mamelukes  spared  the 
majesty  of  the  Pyramids.  Napoleon,  turning  from 
them,  could  make  his  great  appeal, '  Soldiers,  forty 
centuries  look  down  upon  your  actions ! '  But  you 
crept  into  possession  of  Egypt,  by  the  weakness  of 
France,  like  a  fox  creeping  into  a  farm-steading." 

A  different  group  of  critics  direct  the  indictment 
against  various  aspects  of  our  civic  and  national 
life,  against  our  morals,  the  administration  of  our 
laws,  our  universities,  and  even  against  that  palla- 
dium, that  happy  via  media,  the  Anglican  Church. 
It  is  affirmed  with  regard  to  the  national  religion  of 
England  that  that  religion  which  we  are  proud  of 
naming  "Catholic"  nevertheless  is  the  most  pro- 
vincial of  all  the  creeds  born  of  the  Reformation. 
Luther,  Calvin,  even  Zwingli,  can  claim  adherents 
in  other  countries  than  those  in  which  the  faith  of 
each  was  founded.  But  Anglicanism — where  are  the 
proselytes  from  other  nations  who  have  adopted 
that  as  their  life-giving  hope?  And  its  annals 
since  its  institution  are  as  barren  or  as  provincial 


CHURCH  AND  UNIVERSITY  CRITICS      31 

as  its  doctrine  and  its  ritual.  What  single  name  of 
European  power  in  the  eighteenth  or  nineteenth 
centuries  has  it  produced?  And  at  the  present 
hour  it  has  not  a  bishop  whose  name  is  known 
beyond  the  boundaries  of  his  own  diocese,  or  a 
single  theologian  who  has  any  claim  to  the  atten- 
tion of  mankind  except  such  as  is  derived  from  his 
study  of  the  German  masters  in  his  own  science. 
And  even  in  the  sphere  of  theological  criticism 
where  is  the  English  Reuss  or  Renan,  where  is  the 
English  Friedrich  Strauss? 

The  criticism  of  our  universities,  rills  from  the 
German  Parnassus,  is  so  old  and  still  so  well  justi- 
fied that  it  would  be  tedious  to  repeat  it.  A  new 
touch  is  contributed  by  Dr.  Karl  Botticher,  who 
tells  us  in  effect:  "You  govern  millions  who  read 
their  sacred  books  in  the  Sanscrit  and  Arabic 
characters;  but  the  fairest  specimens  of  those 
types  are  still  cast  in  German  fonts.  A  German 
taught  you  the  meaning  of  the  religion  of  that 
province  which  you  regard  as  the  brightest  jewel 
in  the  English  crown ;  and  to  German  scholarship 
you  owe  the  initiatory  impulse  to  study  each  of 
the  four  great  world-religions  of  your  empire — Mo- 
hammedanism, Zoroastrianism,  Buddhism,  and 
Brahminism."  Or  again,  it  is  pointed  out  that 
Macaulay,  our  greatest  national  historian,  makes 
mistakes  in  philosophy  which  no  German  Fuchs 
would  commit.1 

1  "  Macaulay  exhibits  a  lack  of  philosophic  culture  that  abso- 


32  THE  PROBLEM 

Contained  also  in  this  indictment  is  the  charge 
against  English  law,  arising  out  of  the  English 
Press  criticisms  of  the  German  trials  of  English 
spies  a  short  time  ago.  It  is  asserted  that  here  too 
England  is  taking  the  downward  course. 

The  critics  pass  on  to  consider  other  points  of  our 
life — our  army,  for  instance,  for  which  they  have 
nothing  but  contempt.  "You  boast  that  the 
English  flag  is  propped  on  the  bones  of  the  English 
dead;  but  from  Blenheim  to  La  Belle  Alliance1 
German  valour  was  prodigal  of  German  blood  in 
winning  your  victories.  Gibraltar  itself  was  cap- 
tured for  you  by  a  foreign  force  led  by  a  German 
prince;  the  right  wing  at  Blenheim  was  scattered 
and  the  day  lost  when  young  Dessauer — not  yet 
the  old  Dessauer — wrested  victory  from  disaster;2 


lutely  amazes  us  Germans.  He  says  things  that  with  us  no  stu- 
dent would  dare  to  say.  ...  A  comparison  of  Ranke  with 
Macaulay  brings  out  the  contrast  between  German  profundity 
and  English  superficiality."  (Treitschke's  "Politik,"  vol.  II., 
p.  359.)  Emerson's  opinion,  expressed  in  his  "English  Traits," 
is  the  same. 

1 "  La  Belle  Alliance,"  "Schonbund,"  the  designation  for  Napo- 
leon's last  battle  consistently  used  by  Prussian  historians,  e.g., 
Hausser,  Sybel,  Droysen,  Schlosser. 

1  [NOTE. — This,  of  course,  is  an  extreme  instance  of  partial 
statement  by  such  critics.  At  Blenheim  the  right  wing  (under 
Eugene)  was  never  "scattered,"  though  it  was  repulsed;  it  was 
not  Dessau  but  Marlborough  who  changed  his  plan,  concentrated 
on  the  French  centre,  and  thus  broke  their  line.  At  Gibraltar,  the 
share  of  the  fleet  under  Rooke,  who  first  bombarded  the  town  and 
then  landed  the  capturing  force,  is  ignored.] 


SOLDIER  AND  SUFFRAGETTE  INDICTED  33 

and  yet  once  more,  on  the  i8th  of  June,  1815,  the 
advance  of  Blucher  and  his  corps  of  Prussians 
saved  your  army  from  annihilation.  And  did  not 
Professor  Delbruck  inform  us  during  the  Boer  War 
that  your  soldiers  on  the  march  chained  Boer 
women  together  in  order  to  form  a  screen  to  pro- 
tect themselves  from  the  bullets  of  outraged  hus- 
bands and  fathers?  And  do  we  not  know  from 
discussions  in  our  Kriegsschule  that  your  soldiers 
have  laid  down  their  arms  when  every  tenth  man, 
and  sometimes  every  fifteenth  man,  was  wounded; 
whereas  in  1870  our  Germans  stood  unyielding 
even  when  every  third  man  was  down?  General 
von  Bernhardi's  opinion  of  your  officers  of  higher 
grade  is  well  known. " » 

And  finally,  turning  to  English  society,  the  in- 
dictment centres  upon  that  movement  towards 
Woman's  Suffrage  which  has  characterized  English 
life  during  the  last  two  years.  "Does  not  the 
Suffragette,  loud-voiced,  coarse-minded,  stealing 
about  like  a  thief  with  a  hammer  up  her  sleeve, 
represent  English  women  to  the  civilized  world?" 
To  this  caricature  they  oppose  the  picture  of  the 
German  woman,  her  virtues,  her  dignity  and  her 
simplicity.  They  cite  the  magnificent  answer  of 
the  Prussian  mother  in  the  War  of  Liberation  of 
1813:  "Who  is  the  noblest  woman?"  "She  who 

1  Bernhardi's  opinion  of  our  commanders  is  written  all  over  his 
book,  although  he  has  the  highest  regard  for  the  English  private, 
for  the  rank  and  file. 


34  THE  PROBLEM 

has  given  most  sons  to  die  for  the  Fatherland." 
Or  they  quote  Queen  Luise:  "The  children's 
world,  that  is  world  enough  for  me. "  Yet  she  was 
capable  of  appreciating  Goethe.  German  women, 
too,  they  assert,  have  gone  to  war;  but  German 
women  make  war,  not  against  flower-beds  or  golf- 
links,  insensate  pillar-boxes  or  shop  windows,  but 
like  soldiers  against  soldiers.  They  quote  those 
tragic  and  pathetic  incidents  which  occurred  during 
the  great  Befreiungskrieg  exactly  a  hundred  years 
ago ;  and  from  that  they  go  back  four  years  earlier 
to  those  incidents  which  marked  the  battlefields  in 
the  heroic  rising  of  the  Prussian  Schill  in  1809, 
when  in  more  than  one  instance,  as  the  helmets  of 
the  dead  were  removed,  a  flood  of  golden  hair 
rolled  down  from  under  the  helmet  to  the  waist  of 
the  fallen.  That,  they  say,  is  how  German  women 
go  to  war. 

Now  the  accuracy  or  inaccuracy  of  the  various 
counts  in  this  indictment  is  irrelevant  here;  what 
concerns  us  is  that,  now  on  this  point,  now  on  that, 
it  is  accepted  by  thousands  of  Germans  at  the 
present  day  as  a  fair  portraiture  of  England  and 
the  English.  All  Germans  do  not  subscribe  to  all 
these  counts,  few  Germans  do  not  subscribe  to 
some.  It  is  vain  to  call  this  an  echo  of  the  Boer 
War;  the  longest  echo  does  not  last  twelve  years. 
Besides,  what  is  more  evident  to  history  than  that 
there  was  some  deeper  cause  than  Wilhelm  II's 
telegram  for  that  extraordinary  outburst  of  hate? 


THE  PLEA  FOR  DISARMAMENT         35 

The  significance  of  this  indictment  is  its  moral 
scorn.  And  the  inference  drawn  from  it  may  be 
stated  thus :  How  is  the  persistence  of  a  great  un- 
warlike  Power  sprawling  Fafnir-wise  across  the 
planet  to  be  tolerated  by  a  nation  of  warriors? 
Ought  not  the  arrogated  world-supremacy  of  such 
a  race  to  be  challenged?  He  who  strikes  at  Eng- 
land does  not  necessarily  sin  against  the  light  or 
commit  a  crime  against  humanity.  England  is 
failing  because  she  ought  to  fail.  She  is  already 
straining  to  the  utmost.  This  she  betrays  by  her 
pleadings  with  Germany  to  disarm.  Why  should 
not  Belgium  or  Paraguay,  for  that  matter,  propose 
to  Germany  to  limit  her  armaments?  How  did 
England  act  towards  Denmark  in  1801  or  again  in 
1807?  There  you  have  the  epitome  of  the  entire 
history  of  England.  But  now  that  she  feels  her 
strength  leaving  her,  now  that  her  day  is  over,  she 
talks  to  others  of  disarmament!  It  is  the  first 
time  in  history  that  such  propositions  have  been 
made,  and  it  is  fitting  enough  that  they  should 
come  from  this  hypocrite  power.  England  may 
gradually  sink  from  internal  decay,  as  Venice 
gradually  sank  after  1500,  dying  of  senility,  until  at 
a  touch  from  Napoleon's  sword  she  crumbled ;  or,  if 
she  has  spirit  enough,  England  may  perish  from  a 
bayonet-thrust  to  the  heart.  But  perish  she  must. 
And  the  judgment  of  the  great  national  historian  of 
Germany  is  quoted — Heinrich  von  Treitschke,  a 
man  whose  position  is  almost  as  if  he  were  the 


36  THE  PROBLEM 

poet-laureate  in  prose  of  Bismarckism  and  of  the 
Hohenzollern  dynasty.  In  Treitschke's  phrase,  "a 
thing  that  is  wholly  a  sham  cannot  in  this  universe 
of  ours  endure  for  ever.  It  may  endure  for  a  day, 
but  its  doom  is  certain ;  there  is  no  room  for  it  in  a 
world  governed  by  valour,  by  the  Will  to  Power. " 
And  it  was  of  England  that  he  spoke. 


V 


THE  prophecy  of  Niebuhr  eighty  years  ago,  the 
fall  of  Britain  which  Stein  in  his  dying  years 
augured,  is  thus  for  these  critics  nearer  fulfilment. 
The  mode  of  the  fulfilment  is  uncertain. 

The  question  of  questions  to  young  Germans, 
eager  with  historical  analogies,  exuberant  with 
life,  is:  Who  is  to  be  the  inheritor  of  this  mori- 
bund, or  quasi-moribund,  empire?  This  Venice- 
Carthage  of  the  twentieth  century — who  is  to 
destroy  her? 

No  one  who  has  studied  Russian  political  history, 
Russian  art  and  literature,  the  evolution  of  Russian 
ideas,  no  one  who  has  witnessed  the  pathetic 
uncouth  attempts  of  the  Duma,  can  possibly  see  in 
Russia  a  world-leader.  That  part  France  has 
played,  and  cultured  Germans  join  with  Nietzsche 
in  their  tribute  to  the  past  services  of  France  to 
humanity.  She  gave  her  name  to  the  Crusaders; 
in  the  sixteenth  century  she  brought  Italy  to 
Europe;  in  the  eighteenth  she  was  a  legislator  in 


WHO  SHALL  LEAD  THE  WORLD  ?       37 

thought.  Napoleon  in  1809  attempted  to  wrench 
a  planet  from  the  hideous  tentacles  of  this  octopus, 
this  British  dominion  strangling  a  world.  Napo- 
leon failed  to  achieve  this  deliverance  of  the  planet 
from  what  Heine  called  the  dullest,  most  insuffer- 
able, commonplace  and  bourgeois  of  all  empires. 
Shall  Germany  succeed  in  that  task  of  world- 
liberation? 

To  the  students  of  Sybel,  who,  awed  and  solemn, 
saw  in  1870  the  manifest  finger  of  God;  to  the  stu- 
dents of  Giesebrecht,  who  saw  in  Germany  the 
nation  of  nations,  God's  chosen  for  the  accomplish- 
ment of  His  inscrutable  will,  the  answer  is  obvious; 
and  when  from  the  writings  of  Giesebrecht  they 
turn  to  Treitschke,  and  from  Treitschke  to  Droy- 
sen  and  Hausser,  the  old  crude  idea  of  a  day  of 
reckoning  with  England  acquires  a  new  signifi- 
cance. Germany  is  watching  and  waiting.  Year 
by  year  silently  she  prepares.  She  recalls  the 
alternate  elations  and  trembling  counsels  in  Rome 
before  the  march  of  Alaric  in  the  fifth  century; 
and  with  warrior-laughter  she  measures  the  cer- 
tainty of  her  triumph  by  the  convulsive  panic- 
attacks  of  her  ignoble  foe!  After  all,  on  this  earth 
the  one  thing  that  is  insufferable,  whether  in 
politics  or  in  religion,  whether  in  private  or  in 
national  affairs,  is  that  a  sham  should  go  on  pre- 
tending to  be  a  reality,  that  weakness  should 
persist  in  grimacing  as  power,  falsehood  as  truth, 
injustice  as  justice.  That  is  the  hypocrisy  of  the 


•*    43358 


38  THE  PROBLEM 

soul.  Hateful  to  God  and  to  the  enemies  of  God 
is  such  continuance — "A  Dio  spiacenti  ed  a' 
nemici  sui!" 

And  when  from  the  present  and  the  nearer  past 
Germans  turn  to  the  remoter  past  and  to  the  dis- 
tant periods  of  their  history  and  inquire:  "What 
are  our  title-deeds  to  world-empire?"  a  series  of 
heroic  and  tragic  forms  meets  their  wondering 
eyes.  For  Englishmen,  indifferent  to  or  careless 
of  their  own  history  and  blankly  ignorant  of  Ger- 
many's, it  is  difficult  to  realize  the  effect  upon  the 
German  mind  of  the  discovery  of  the  imperial  eras 
of  her  history — the  recovery  of  Charlemagne  as  a 
German  hero,  the  exhumation  from  chronicle  and 
annals  of  the  forms  of  the  Ottonides,  and,  above 
all,  of  the  Hohenstaufen  in  the  coloured  and 
entrancing  pages  of  Giesebrecht.  There  is  no 
resisting  the  impressive  grandeur  of  these  figures, 
and  the  young  German  does  not  exist  who  can  look 
back  on  that  history  without  emotion  and  swelling 
pride. * 

The  Prussian  School  of  historians  has  written  the 
history  of  Germany  as  the  exposition  of  a  single 
divine  idea — the  movement  towards  unity  under 
Prussia,  and  the  creation,  not  of  a  new  empire,  but 

1  No  one  has  felt  more  intimately  than  Wilhelm  II.  the  glamour 
of  those  eras.  Personally,  and  in  his  own  temper,  he  has  re- 
sponded to  its  literary  expression — the  heroic  6lan  of  Wolfram, 
the  naive  charm  of  Walther,  Gottfried's  wayward  imaginings, 
the  forest-romance  of  Iwein.  Yet  he  is  no  mere  "  Cultur-KOnig," 
no  Ludwig  of  Bavaria. 


"WORLD-DOMINION  OR  RUIN"         39 

of  a  new  phase  of  empire.  To  them  avatar  suc- 
ceeds avatar.  The  Karlings  represent  the  triumph 
over  Rome.  Charlemagne  ends  the  work  begun  on 
the  obscure  and  bloody  fields  of  Campi  Raudii  and 
guided  to  a  more  glorious  issue  by  Alaric  and 
Ataulf,  by  Genseric  and  Theodoric.  The  Saxons 
submit  to  the  Rome-idea,  to  Galilee;  but  with 
the  Hohenstaufen  German  genius  in  religion,  in 
politics,  in  law,  in  poetry,  asserts  itself.  An 
immense  pause  follows,  ending  in  the  obscurantist 
Habsburgs;  but  through  all  the  nation's  life 
advances. 

And  now,  under  the  Hohenzollern,  what  is  the 
future?  Bernhardi,  at  least,  is  explicit:  "For  us 
there  are  two  alternatives  and  no  third — world- 
dominion  or  ruin,  Weltmacht  oder  Niedergang."  It 
is  the  interpretation  of  Treitschke's  maxim, 
"Selbst  ist  der  Mann." 


VI 


WHEN,  turning  to  England,  I  consider  the  apathy 
or  the  stolid  indifference  of  the  nation — when,  for 
instance,  I  consider  the  deliberate  and  hostile 
silence  or  loud  calumnies  which,  for  the  past  seven 
years,  have  accompanied  Lord  Roberts's  crusade; 
and  when,  over  against  this  apathy,  I  survey  in 
this  month  of  February,  1913,  the  energy,  the 
single,  devoted  purposefulness  throbbing  every- 
where throughout  Germany,  her  forward-ranging 


40  THE  PROBLEM 

effort,  her  inner  life,  her  army,  her  fleet,  I  seem  to 
hear  again  the  thunder  of  the  footsteps  of  a  great 
host.  ...  It  is  the  war-bands  of  Alaric ! 

And  pondering  the  future,  seeking  in  the  past, 
where  alone  it  can  be  found,  some  taper-light  to 
illumine  the  future,  there  rises  before  me  one  of  the 
most  solemn  moments  that  I  have  ever  personally 
experienced  in  English  history.  It  was  in  1900,  in 
the  early  stages  of  the  Boer  War.  But  a  few  weeks 
ago,  and  the  Scythian's  taunt  to  the  Roman  Caesar 
seemed  borne  to  us  down  the  centuries,  "I  marvel 
that  you  still  speak  of  empire,  you  who  can  no 
longer  make  war  upon  a  village!"  Now  the  crisis 
was  over. 

On  that  afternoon  we  had  before  us  in  the  Albert 
Hall  a  great  statesman,  the  late  Marquis  of  Salis- 
bury. What  had  been  in  his  mind  during  the 
fateful  weeks?  And  as  he  rose  and  the  immense 
hush  swept  over  the  audience  it  was  difficult  not  to 
recall  Milton's  verses,  born  perhaps  of  his  own 
recollection  of  some  chance  visit  to  the  House  when 
Straff ord  rose  or  Pym,  or  from  later  memories  of 
Cromwell  himself: 

".  .  .  .  with    grave 
Aspect  he  rose,  and  in  his  rising  seem'd 
A  pillar  of  state;  deep  on  his  front  engraven 
Deliberation  sat  and  publick  care; 
And  princely  counsel  in  his  face  yet  shone 
Majestick,  though  in  ruin ;  sage  he  stood 


LORD  SALISBURY  41 

With  Atlantean  shoulders  fit  to  bear 

The  weight  of  mightiest  monarchies ;  his  look 

Drew  audience  and  attention  still  as  nighft 

Or  summer's  noontide  air,  while  thus  he  spake. " 

In  Lord  Salisbury,  at  once  in  his  personality  and 
in  his  genius,  I  saw  then,  as  I  see  now,  the  greatest 
statesman  in  English  history  since  the  eighteenth 
century,  the  last  great  Englishman  of  the  line  of 
Strafford,  Somers,  Bolingbroke,  Carteret,  Chat- 
ham and  Canning.  Certainly  in  no  politician  in 
English  history  have  we  the  proofs  of  a  profounder 
insight.  In  this  very  matter  of  Germany,  for 
instance,  he  foresaw,  point  by  point,  her  develop- 
ment; and  at  the  beginning  of  his  career,  in  one 
brilliant  article  after  another  in  our  quarterlies, 
Lord  Salisbury,  then  Lord  Robert  Cecil,  marked 
out  the  exact  lines  which  that  development  of 
Germany  took — from  the  Kiel  Canal  right  on  to 
those  batteries  and  "Dreadnoughts"  concentrated 
there  in  the  North  Sea,  which  are  already,  whether 
we  regard  them  as  such  or  not,  the  first  conflict 
between  England  and  Germany.1 

And  in  delivering  one  of  the  last  and,  I  think,  one 
of  the  greatest  of  his  speeches,  Lord  Salisbury  must 

1  And  in  that  conflict  England  has  suffered  her  first  defeat,  her 
first  moral  defeat.  She  has  had  to  withdraw  her  fleet  from  the 
Mediterranean.  That  sea  was  once  ours — an  English  lake.  It  is 
no  longer  ours.  Our  power  is  concentrated,  watching  our  dearest 
friends,  those  Germans  who  have  no  intention  whatever  of  coming 
near  England! 


42  THE  PROBLEM 

have  felt  the  futility  of  his  insight.  He  might,  if 
Greek  tragedy  had  been  as  familiar  to  him  as  the 
laws  of  metals,  have  cited  the  verses  of  Teiresias: 


,  <I>pove!v  dx;  Setvbv  IvOa 
XUTJ 


The  thought  must  have  been  in  his  mind.  Yet  he 
was  to  the  last  a  fighter,  an  Englishman  who  never 
doubted  his  country's  ultimate  victory,  temperate, 
a  master  of  the  under-statement,  a  man  whom, 
upon  the  whole,  it  is  a  greater  achievement  for  a 
nation  to  have  produced  than  to  have  produced 
a  Bismarck.2 

And  the  words  which  Lord  Salisbury  spoke  that 
day?  If  ever  a  great  warning  was  given  to  a 
people  it  was  contained  in  those  words,  in  his  ref- 
erence to  dying  empires  and  dying  nations,  to  the 
passing  of  kingdoms,  the  vicissitudes  of  States  and 

1  "Alas,  how  dreadful  to  have  wisdom  where  it  profits  not  the 
wise!" 

3  1  do  not  find  less  vividness,  more  wordiness  in  his  speeches 
than  in  those  of  Bismarck.  Eulogizers  of  an  academic  bias, 
indeed,  assert  that  Bismarck's  speeches  will  endure  whilst  Ger- 
many endures.  He  has  enriched,  they  say,  the  German  language 
with  innumerable  phrases;  but  when  challenged  they  are  slow  to 
produce  those  phrases.  They  begin  and  nearly  always  end  with 
"blood  and  iron."  I  make  no  such  claims  for  Lord  Salisbury. 
He  was  not  an  artist,  nor  was  Bismarck;  but  he  was  superior  to 
the  latter  as  a  thinker.  Had  he  been  a  German  he  would  not 
have  incurred  the  just  and  savage  contempt  which  Otto  Weininger 
and  Nietzsche  have  poured  on  Bismarck. 


DEMOSTHENE'S  TO  ATHENS  43 

the  mutation  in  things ;  and,  above  all,  in  his  appeal 
to  Englishmen  to  arm  and  prepare  themselves  for 
war,  for  a  war  which  might  be  on  them  at  any  hour, 
and  a  war  for  their  very  existence  as  a  nation  and 
as  a  race.  And  he  quoted  with  deep  meaning  and 
deep  purpose — for  as  an  orator  Lord  Salisbury 
seldom  strayed  into  the  past  of  history  without 
meaning  to  the  utmost  every  word  he  said — he 
quoted  the  downfall  of  Carthage. x 

As  I  walked  from  the  meeting,  the  twilight  fall- 
ing across  the  Park,  the  words  of  another  orator 
came  back  to  me — the  exhortation  addressed  by 
Demosthenes  to  Athens,  words  which,  spoken  in 
Athens'  darkest  hour,  bear  a  strange  resemblance  to 
those  spoken  by  Lord  Salisbury  in  this,  the  last  of 
his  great  speeches.  "Yet,  O  Athenians,"  said  the 
Greek,  "yet  is  there  time!  And  there  is  one 
manner  in  which  you  can  recover  your  greatness, 
or,  dying,  fall  worthy  of  your  past  at  Marathon 
and  Salamis.  Yet,  O  Athenians,  you  have  it  in 
your  power;  and  the  manner  of  it  is  this.  Cease  to 

1  Underlying  the  discussions  in  this  country  as  to  Germany's 
motires  for  war  with  England  there  is  often  the  assumption  that 
it  is  not  England  that  Germany  desires,  but  England's  colonies. 
Yet  has  England  the  power  to  surrender  the  colonies?  Or  if  she 
surrendered  them,  Canada  or  New  Zealand,  for  instance,  would 
they  yield  at  England's  bidding?  And  in  attempting  to  enter 
into  possession  of  Canada,  Germany  would  at  once  find  herself  at 
war  with  the  United  States.  But  it  is  not  our  colonies  that  Ger- 
many desires.  It  is  a  great  central  European  State,  with  these 
islands  as  its  conquered  provinces — that  is  the  true  meaning  of 
Lord  Salisbury's  last  solemn  warnings  from  the  fate  of  Carthage. 


44  THE  PROBLEM 

hire  your  armies.  Go  yourselves,  every  man  of 
you,  and  stand  in  the  ranks;  and  either  a  victory 
beyond  all  victories  in  its  glory  awaits  you,  or, 
falling,  you  shall  fall  greatly  and  worthy  of  your 
past!"  " 

The  r61es  of  Demosthenes  in  Athens  and  of  Cato 
or  Tacitus  in  Rome  are  significant.  These  men  are 
phenomena  in  an  onward-rushing  stream.  But 
Athens  listened  to  Demosthenes  as  she  might  have 
listened  to  the  protagonist  in  one  of  the  tragedies. 
Yet  this  was  her  own  tragedy.  Would  England  be 
wiser  than  Athens? 

Twelve  years  have  passed.  The  voice  which  that 
afternoon  thrilled  an  immense  audience  is  still. 
Edward  VII  has  succeeded,  and,  after  a  brief 
dominion,  has  followed  the  Empress-Queen  to  the 
vaults  at  Windsor.  It  was  1900;  it  is  1913;  and  to 
the  words  of  the  last  great  Englishman  in  politics 
there  have  been  added  the  message  and  solemn 
warning  of  perhaps  the  greatest  living  leader  of 
men  in  the  field  of  battle,  the  man  who  more  than 
any  other  merits  the  name  "the  Sidney  of  these 
later  times" — Lord  Roberts.  How  much  more 
insistent  at  this  hour,  how  much  more  imperious, 
challenging  to  every  Englishman  who  cares  for 
more  than  the  day's  transient  interests,  have 
become  the  words  of  the  Greek  orator,  which  find 
this  strange  echo,  after  more  than  two  thousand 
years,  in  the  summons  of  these  great  Englishmen: 
"Rouse  yourselves  from  your  lethargy!  Cease  to 


LORD  ROBERTS'S  MESSAGE  45 

hire  your  soldiers!  Arm  and  stand  in  the  ranks 
yourselves — as  Englishmen  should!  And  thus, 
dying  you  shall  die  greatly,  or,  victorious,  yours 
shall  be  such  a  victory  as  nothing  in  England's 
past  can  exceed  or  rival. " 


LECTURE  II 

PEACE  AND  WAR 


THE  theme  of  our  last  lecture  was  the  confronta- 
tion of  two  great  nations,  each  endowed  from  the 
past  with  the  memories  of  ancient  valour,  of  hero- 
ism in  art  and  poetry  as  in  war  and  politics;  each, 
again,  possessing  that  attribute  which  I  can  only 
describe  as  innate  capacity  or  genius  for  empire. 
Yet  the  one  has  been  for  two  hundred  years  the 
possessor  of  the  richest  as  well  as  the  most  in- 
teresting portions  of  this  earth,  whilst  the  other  is 
shut  within  its  boundaries,  the  Baltic,  the  Danube, 
and  the  Rhine.  England  is  a  nation  schooled  in 
empire  from  the  past,  the  power  which  once 
belonged  to  the  few  gradually  passing  more  and 
more  into  the  ranks  of  the  English  race  itself,  so 
that  you  have  for  the  first  time  in  history  at 
once  a  nation  and  a  democracy  that  is  imperial. * 

1  This  is  the  unique  character  of  Britain  as  an  empire.  Athens 
was  an  example  of  this,  but  Athens  was  a  civic  empire,  not  a 
national  empire  in  the  sense  in  which  England  is  a  nation.  More- 
over, whilst  it  was  in  form  a  republic  and  democratic,  it  ivas  in 
its  essence  aristocratic  and  oligarchic,  the  large  majority  of  the 
population  having  no  share,  direct  or  indirect,  in  government. 

46 


ENGLAND  AND  GERMANY  CONFRONTED  47 

In  contrast  to  this,  Germany  is  a  nation  which  is 
undisciplined  in  empire,  which  has  never  yet 
known  its  glory.  The  position  of  Wilhelm  II  is 
that  of  an  emperor  without  an  empire. 

And  the  question  we  had  to  consider,  quite 
abstractly,  was :  What,  according  to  the  philosophy 
of  history,  or  even  according  to  the  mere  processes 
of  common  sense,  is  likely  to  result  from  such  a 
confrontation?  Above  all,  what  is  likely  to  result 
when  the  first  nation,  though  pursuing  colossal 
organic  ideals,  yet  seems  to  have  become  almost 
weary  of  the  glory  of  empire,  expressing  frequently 
the  desire  for  arbitration,  for  the  limitation  of 
armaments,  a  "naval  holiday,"  peace  at  any 
price;1  when  its  war-spirit,  its  energy,  its  sense  of 

The  nearest  approach  to  Athens  is  not  England,  but  the  Venice  of 
the  middle  period,  the  Venice  of  the  great  Serrata  del  Consiglio, 
where  the  whole  mass  of  the  inhabitants  were  excluded  from 
political  power,  unless  those  descended  from  or  connected  with 
the  governing  authorities  of  the  time. 

1  Within  the  last  few  days,  for  instance,  at  a  mere  suggestion 
by  Admiral  Tirpitz  as  to  the  diminution  of  the  German  Navy,  the 
whole  Liberal  Press  rushed  forward  like  gudgeons  to  welcome 
even  the  shadow  of  a  pretence  of  peace.  Yet  what  really  underlay 
this  suggestion  was  the  desire  of  the  German  government  to  have 
the  more  power  to  put  forward  their  unprecedented  demand  for 
fifty-two  millions  to  increase  the  German  Army.  But,  indeed,  to 
no  student  of  German  history,  above  all  to  no  student  of  Hohen- 
zollern  history,  does  this  give  the  slightest  surprise.  Such 
Machiavellism  in  politics  has  been  the  mark  of  Prussian  history 
from  the  moment  that  Prussia  appeared  as  a  first-rate  Power  in 
Europe  under  the  Great  Elector,  when  it  led  to  Prussia's  first 
great  victory  at  Fehrbellin.  What  was  the  policy  of  Frederick  I 


48  PEACE  AND  WAR 

heroism  are  apparently  diminishing,  and  the  mere 
craving  for  life  and  its  comforts  seems  to  be  con- 
quering every  other  passion — as  if  to  this  nation 
the  aim  of  all  life  were  the  avoidance  of  suffering — 
what,  I  say,  is  likely  to  result,  if,  confronting  this, 
you  have  a  nation  high  in  its  courage,  lofty  in  its 
ambitions,  containing  within  itself  apparently 
inexhaustible  forces,  moving  on  its  own  path, 
which  in  the  future  may  lead  it  to  destinies  to 
which  even  the  imagination  of  a  Treitschke  can 
hardly  assign  a  limit? 

In  to-day's  lecture  we  have  a  somewhat  different 
problem  to  face,  but  one  that  is  intimately  and 
organically  connected  with  the  subject  of  the  last 
lecture.  It  is  the  problem  indicated  by  such 
phrases  as  "universal  peace,"  "the  end  of  war," 
"all  our  swords  turned  to  reaping-hooks,  all  our 
barracks  turned  to  granaries,"  and  the  like,  the 
problem  raised  by  those  who  would  wish  those 
energies  which  now  find  their  scope  in  battle  to  be 
diverted  to  ends  which  have  as  their  object  that 
great  aim  in  life — the  avoidance  of  suffering  and 

and  of  Frederick  the  Great  himself  but  just  this?  "He  is  a 
fool,"  said  Frederick  the  Great,  "and  that  nation  is  a  fool,  who, 
having  the  power  to  strike  his  enemy  unawares,  does  not  strike 
and  strike  his  deadliest. "  Even  Frederick  William  III,  empty 
and  vain  as  he  was,  a  man  whom  Napoleon  derided  as  "a  tailor 
amongst  kings,"  used  this  same  policy  in  1813  against  Napoleon 
— and  the  Battle  of  the  Nations  was  the  result.  And  in  the  nine- 
teenth century  the  same  policy  has  guided  the  Emperor  William  I 
and  the  present  Kaiser. 


THE   CRY   FOR   PACIFICISM  49 

the  multiplication  of  comforts;  in  a  word,  the 
problem  of  Pacificism  and  the  theories  of  the 
Pacificists  and  their  comparative  influence  on 
England  and  on  Germany. 

The  theory  of  Pacificism  is  a  growing  force  in 
English  thought  and  English  literature,  and  is,  in 
English  politics,  apparently  becoming  a  principle 
of  a  great  and  historical  party — one  of  its  ideals,  at 
least.  We  have  in  practical  politics  witnessed  its 
operation  during  the  last  decade  in  the  noisy  if 
transient  enthusiasm,  not  necessarily  insincere, 
with  which  the  successive  Conferences  at  The 
Hague  have  been  garlanded ;  or  again  in  the  recep- 
tion of  President  Taft's  "Message";  or  again  in 
the  appeals  to  arbitration,  and  the  various  pro- 
posals for  the  limitation  of  armaments,  serious  or 
grotesque,  to  which  I  have  referred. 

In  this  effusive  sentiment  for  peace,  these  spas- 
modic efforts  to  stop  what  it  names  "the  mad  race 
for  armaments,"  has  England,  this  Power  which 
possesses  one-fifth  of  the  globe  and  an  army  at 
least  as  large  as  that  of  Switzerland,  forgotten  its 
sense  of  humour?  Do  we  imagine  that  the  other 
Powers  of  the  Continent  see  England  exactly  as 
England  sees  itself — England !  the  successful  burg- 
lar who,  an  immense  fortune  amassed,  has  retired 
from  business,  and  having  broken  every  law, 
human  and  divine,  violated  every  instinct  of 
honour  and  fidelity  on  every  sea  and  on  every 
continent,  desires  now  the  protection  of  the  police ! 

4 


50  PEACE   AND   WAR 

"If  you  are  not  a  coward,"  says  a  character  in 
one  of  the  Sagas,  "stand  still  whilst  I  send  you  this 
gift " — the  hurling  of  a  spear!  Similarly  Germany 
retorts  when  England,  under  her  hypocritical  or 
anxious  dread,  proposes  to  disarm— "You  are  the 
great  robber-State;  yet  now  in  the  twentieth 
century,  as  if  the  war  for  the  world  were  over 
because  you  are  glutted  with  booty,  now  it  is  you, 
you  who  preach  to  us  Germans  universal  peace, 
arbitration,  and  the  diminution  of  armaments! 
But  our  position  is  that  this  war  is  not  over." 
And  they  exhibit  England's  overtures  to  Germany 
as  due  to  subtlety  or  cowardice. 

That  is  the  significance  of  Germany's  reply  to 
the  offer  of  the  British  government  in  1907  to 
reduce  her  programme  from  three  "  Dreadnoughts" 
to  two.  Her  answer  was  to  increase  her  estimates 
and  accelerate  her  programme.  That  is  the  sig- 
nificance of  her  answer  in  1908,  when  England  laid 
down  only  two  "Dreadnoughts"  and  Germany 
retorted  by  laying  down  four.  That,  above  all,  is 
the  significance  of  Germany's  action  in  191 1 ,  when, 
amid  all  the  froth  and  loathsome  sentiment  and 
empty  vapouring  around  President  Taft's  "Mes- 
sage"— when  it  seemed  as  if  humanity,  in  politics, 
at  least,  had  forgotten  its  own  semblance — 
suddenly  a  man's  voice,  human  at  last,  announced 
itself  in  the  courage  and  common-sense  of  Beth- 
mann-Hollweg's  utterance  (March,  1911),  "The 
vital  strength  of  a  nation  is  the  only  measure  of 


GERMANY'S   ANSWER  51 

that  nation's  armaments."  And  that,  in  1913, 
is  still  the  significance  of  Germany's  answer  to 
the  egregious  proposal  of  "  a  naval  holiday  " :  a  war 
levy  of  £52,000,000  to  be  expended  on  fortresses, 
aircraft,  and  barracks;  the  peace  strength  of  the 
army  to  be  raised  from  six  hundred  thousand  to 
between  eight  and  nine  hundred  thousand  men. 

Germany  will  never  sincerely  cease  arming.  If 
England  builds  on  the  dream  of  Germany  acqui- 
escent she  is  destined  to  a  bloody  and  terrible 
awakening.  Bethmann-Hollweg,  in  1911,  but 
repeats  the  truth  enunciated  by  Treitschke  in 
1890,  that  a  nation's  armed  force  is  the  expression 
of  a  nation's  will  to  power,  of  a  nation's  will  to  life, 
and  must  advance  with  that  life.  We  can  under- 
stand the  elation  of  Bernhardi,  his  pride  in  his 
country  and  its  great  past,  his  belief  in  its  yet 
greater  future  as  the  nation  of  nations,  dowered 
with  the  right  to  set  itself  the  high  task  of  guiding 
the  future  of  humanity. 

A  year  ago,  in  speaking  of  the  French  Revolu- 
tion, I  defined  the  essence  of  that  movement  as 
the  strife  from  a  high  to  an  ever  higher  reality. 
Amongst  the  Powers  and  States  of  the  Continent 
and  of  the  world  that  seems  Germany's  part  at  the 
present  hour. 

And  here  let  me  say  with  regard  to  Germany 
that  of  all  England's  enemies  she  is  by  far  the 
greatest;  and  by  "greatness"  I  mean  not  merely 
magnitude,  not  her  millions  of  soldiers,  her  millions 


52  PEACE   AND   WAR 

of  inhabitants,  I  mean  grandeur  of  soul.  She  is  the 
greatest  and  most  heroic  enemy — if  she  is  our 
enemy — that  England,  in  the  thousand  years  of 
her  history,  has  ever  confronted.  In  the  sixteenth 
century  we  made  war  upon  Spain  and  the  empire 
of  Spain.  But  Germany  in  the  twentieth  century 
is  a  greater  power,  greater  in  conception,  in  thought, 
in  all  that  makes  for  human  dignity,  than  was  the 
Spain  of  Charles  V  and  Philip  II.  In  the  seven- 
teenth century  we  fought  against  Holland;  but 
the  Germany  of  Bismarck  and  the  Kaiser  is  greater 
than  the  Holland  of  De  Witt.  In  the  eighteenth 
century  we  fought  against  France;  and  again,  the 
Germany  of  to-day  is  a  higher,  more  august  power 
than  France  under  Louis  XIV. 


II 


WHAT,  then,  is  Pacificism?  Dismissing  from  our 
minds  for  a  moment  German  criticism  or  German 
interpretation  of  England's  purposes,  let  us  con- 
sider the  ideal  itself  and  its  exponents. 

The  ideal  in  itself  is  so  fair,  this  vision  of  a  de- 
sirable life,  that  we  are  silent  even  before  the 
eccentricities  or  fatuities  of  its  advocates.  Man, 
in  his  war  against  the  vast  sorrow  of  existence  and 
necessary  pain,  declares:  Now  we  shall  at  least 
cease  to  torture  each  other;  man  shall  no  longer 
add  deliberately  to  the  sufferings  of  man,  more 
tiger  than  the  tiger.  This  earth  then  shall  afford 


PACIFICISM  53 

the  picture  which  allured  the  imagination  of  Mil- 
ton and  of  Shelley,  nation  side  by  side  with  nation, 
race  beside  race,  arranged  in  variegated  communi- 
ties and  States — monarchies,  empires,  democracies, 
republics — sedulous  in  a  many-coloured  harmoni- 
ous activity.  The  very  memory  of  war  and  of 
war-heroisms — Napoleon,  Caesar,  Alexander,  Achil- 
les— falls  into  the  dim  background  of  an  ever 
remoter  past  from  which  humanity  has  liberated 
itself,  dedicated,  not  to  war,  but  to  the  emulous 
rivalries  of  peace,  to  the  creation  of  beauty,  to  the 
perfecting  of  the  mind,  to  the  discovery  of  fresh 
modes  of  access  to  human  nobility  and  to  human 
joy — music,  painting,  sculpture,  poetry,  architec- 
ture; dedicated  to  the  concentration  in  peace  and 
leisure  of  man's  faculties  upon  the  extension  of 
knowledge,  the  conquest  of  the  eras  of  the  past 
and  of  the  eras  of  the  future  as  it  bursts  through 
the  present  and  its  veils  like  the  sun  through  fogs, 
the  ever  wider  expansion  of  our  scrutiny  into  the 
interstellar  spaces,  thought  and  imagination  fusing 
themselves,  above  all,  in  some  newer  vision  of  the 
universe  and  of  God  which  shall  as  far  transcend 
the  old  philosophies  and  the  old  religions  as  the 
theories  of  modern  astronomy  transcend  those  of 
Hipparchus  or  Tycho  Brah6. 

Before  such  an  ideal  we  are  disposed,  I  say,  to  be 
tolerant  even  to  the  extravagances  of  Tolstoi,  his 
appeals  to  the  Gospels,  for  instance — though  a 
dissertation  upon  Christ  as  a  strategist  might  have 


54  PEACE   AND   WAR 

been  written  by  a  mediasvalist,  if  strategy  had  been 
an  art  then — and  to  listen  without  smiling  when 
the  great  Spanish  legist  Alberdi  declares  that  the 
soldier  is  no  higher  than  the  executioner,  though 
one  would  have  imagined  that  the  difference  be- 
tween the  hangman  on  the  scaffold,  pinioning  his 
victim  before  destroying  him,  and  the  warrior  on 
the  battlefield,  perilling  his  life,  would  have  been 
apparent  even  to  a  Spanish  doctrinaire! 

It  is  difficult  to  answer  the  contentions  of  Pa- 
cificism just  as  it  is  difficult  to  answer  all  modern 
isms,  because  every  ism  has  certain  groups  within 
it,  and  every  group  offers  its  own  interpretation. 
To  the  group  represented  by  Count  Lyof  Tolstoi, 
for  instance,  war  is  condemnable  because  it  is 
contrary  to  the  very  spirit — as  he  understands 
them — of  the  four  Gospels  and  of  religion  itself. 
Did  not  Christ  come  to  the  earth  to  proclaim 
peace?  Eighteen  hundred  years  have  rolled  away 
and  there  is  nothing  but  war.  To  this  there  is  the 
retort  that,  though  Christ  does  not  disdain  to  use 
a  metaphor  from  the  life  of  camps,  yet  He  accom- 
panies it  by  no  anathema  on  war.  And  the  peace 
which  Christ  came  to  proclaim  was  not  the  peace 
of  the  ending  of  battles;  it  was  the  peace  within 
the  soul,  the  spirit  at  one  with  itself,  Islam,  in  the 
sense  that  Mohammed  used  it,  a  metaphysical 
peace  altogether  apart  from  political  peace. 

Then,  again,  another  group  represents  war  as 
wholly  evil  because  it  is  contrary  to  Law,  asserting 


THE   SENTIMENTAL  CRUSADE         55 

that  when  two  nations  go  to  war  it  is  as  if  two 
litigants  in  a  Court  of  Law  were  to  maintain 
each  his  own  cause  by  violence.  This  is  the  posi- 
tion taken  up  by  the  followers  of  Alberdi.  Yet 
the  litigant  appeals  to  something  higher  than 
himself,  while  no  free  State  sees  anything  higher 
than  itself. 

Again,  there  is  a  whole  crowd,  to  whom  I  need 
not  refer  individually,  of  lesser  names,  publicists, 
journalists,  novelists  and  mere  cranks,  to  whom 
this  phantasm  appears  the  one  thing  worthy  to 
concern  men  in  any  serious  manner — all  of  them 
having  the  peculiar  characteristic  that  they 
approach  the  plain  man,  the  man  in  the  street, 
with  a  slightly  truculent  air:  "Now,  why  don't 
you  help  us  to  bring  about  this  good  of  ours?" 
And  there  is  nothing  for  the  plain  man  to  answer 
unless  this:  "The  thing  you  are  trying  to  bring 
about  does  not  exist — it  is  simply  a  nothing.  If,  as 
Bismarck  did  at  the  Congress  of  Berlin,  you  at- 
tempt to  bring  about  peace  between  any  two 
individual  nations,  that,  of  course,  is  a  matter 
within  the  scope  of  common  sense ;  but  this  other — 
this  'universal  peace' — what  is  it?"  And  then 
they  can  only  reiterate  their  belief  in  the  passing 
away  of  war,  when  all  our  swords  shall  be  turned  to 
reaping-hooks,  our  barracks  into  granaries,  and,  I 
suppose,  all  our  howitzers  into  fire-irons ! 

But  what  can  be  said  in  answer  to  the  pacificists' 
minute  descriptions  of  the  horrors  of  war?  To 


56  PEACE   AND   WAR 

throw  wide  the  field-hospitals  and  exhibit  doctors 
and  dressers  at  work  on  the  wounded;  to  point  to 
the  dead  and  dying  hurried  into  the  trenches;  to 
assert,  "This  is  war;  this  is  reality,"  is  as  convinc- 
ing and  as  reasonable  as  to  point  to  a  regiment  on 
parade  with  band  playing  and  colours  flying  and  to 
say:  "This  is  the  reality."  War  will  never  be 
abolished  by  such  denunciation  of  isolated  fea- 
tures. For  in  war  there  is  always  a  series  of  in- 
tricate and,  complex  phenomena,  extending  from 
the  period  of  apparent  peace  to  the  inception  of 
the  idea  of  conflict,  on  through  the  corresponding 
changes  in  the  mind  and  purposes  of  the  govern- 
ment and  nation  to  the  conflict  itself,  the  battle- 
field, the  sequel,  the  terms. 

There  in  its  specious  and  glittering  beauty  the 
ideal  of  Pacificism  remains;  yet  in  the  long  march 
of  humanity  across  thousands  of  years  or  thou- 
sands of  centuries  it  remains  still  an  ideal,  lost  in 
inaccessible  distances,  as  when  first  it  gleamed 
across  the  imagination.  It  has  always  been  there. 
We  find  its  traces  in  the  Iliad  and  in  the  Sagas, 
in  the  verse  of  Pindar  and  in  the  profound  and 
reflective  prose  of  Thucydides.  Livy's  imagina- 
tion responded  to  it,  even  when  with  the  brush  of 
a  Veronese  or  of  a  Titian  he  painted  the  wars  of 
Rome.  It  informs  some  of  the  noblest  passages 
of  the  Annals  of  Tacitus.  It  appears  as  the 
"Truce  of  God"  in  the  Middle  Age,  and  in  the 
orators  of  the  Reformation  pronounces  a  maledic- 


ASPECTS  OF   PACIFICISM  57 

tion  upon  him  who  wages  war  unjustly.  In  the 
seventeenth  century  it  is  proclaimed  as  an  ideal  in 
the  name  of  Religion,  in  the  eighteenth  in  the 
name  of  Humanity,  and  in  the  nineteenth  in  the 
name  of  commerce,  industrialism  and  the  progress 
of  the  working  classes. 

It  is  not,  perhaps,  until  the  eighteenth  century 
that  this  idea  of  universal  peace  displays  its  present 
characteristics.  At  the  period  of  the  Marlborough 
wars  there  appears  in  France  a  portentous  folio 
volume  by  the  Abbe  de  St.  Pierre,  having  for  its 
central  thesis  the  evils  of  war  in  the  abstract.  The 
position  there  taken  up  is  not  very  different  from 
the  position  taken  up  by  Tolstoi.  War  is  stigma- 
tized as  being  in  itself  hostile  to  religion,  and  is 
denounced  as  being  contrary  to  the  commands  of 
Christ.  This  book  produced  a  great  many  works 
of  a  similar  kind,  and  many  refutations. 

In  the  course  of  the  nineteenth  century  you  find 
this  idea  appearing  here  in  England  in  a  new  phase, 
above  all  in  the  "Manchester  School."  War  is 
now  regarded  and  described  not  so  much  as  hostile 
to  religion,  not  so  much  as  hostile  to  the  commands 
of  Christ,  but  as  inimical  to  the  interests  of  indus- 
try. The  peace  of  the  world  must  be  secured, 
indeed;  but  it  is  to  be  secured  not  by  religion  but 
by  a  great  conspiracy — or  co-operation,  if  you  like 
— of  all  the  forces  of  industry  throughout  Europe. 
That  is  the  Manchester  doctrine  of  universal 
peace — highly  characteristic,  one  would  say,  of  the 


58  PEACE   AND   WAR 

nineteenth  century!  Yet  it  had  a  distinct  power 
at  once  in  France  and  in  Germany. 

The  final  form  that  this  strange  theory  has 
assumed  is  that  which  it  now  affects  to  wear  in 
the  twentieth  century,  a  form  equally  interesting. 
Now  war  is  declaimed  against  and  universal  peace 
with  all  its  beauties  is  proclaimed,  not  because  war 
is  contrary  to  the  laws  of  God,  to  the  laws  of 
religion,  but — because  it  is  opposed  to  social  well- 
being,  and,  economically,  is  profitless  alike  to  vic- 
tor and  to  vanquished.  It  has  ceased  to  pay, 
and  it  has  ceased,  therefore,  to  add  to  the  comfort 
of  nations ! 

Yet  despite  this  hubbub  of  talk  down  all  the 
centuries  war  has  continued — absolutely  as  if  not  a 
word  had  been  said  either  on  one  side  or  the  other. 
Man's  dreadful  toll  in  blood  has  not  yet  all  been 
paid.  The  human  race  bears  still  this  burden. 
Declaimed  against  in  the  name  of  religion,  in  the 
name  of  humanity,  in  the  name  of  profit-and-loss, 
war  still  goes  on,  and  to  this  day  it  is  there — there 
in  the  Balkans,  raging  at  this  hour ! 


Ill 


WHY,  then,  is  universal  peace  still  an  ideal?  Why 
is  it  less  like  some  hope  of  the  future,  gilding  the 
eastern  horizon,  than  like  some  memory  of  a 
Saturnian  age  sunk  far  below  the  darkened  hori- 
zons of  the  past? 


UNIVERSAL   PEACE  59 

An  enumeration  of  the  evils  that  attend  man's 
life  in  time  of  peace  is  obviously  no  answer.  It  is 
equally  no  answer  to  celebrate  the  opportunities  to 
good-fellowship  and  self-sacrifice  which  the  battle- 
field affords,  and  sometimes  witnesses.  Towards 
other  ideals  man  has  progressed — in  his  war  against 
disease,  for  instance,  and  in  his  war  against  nature, 
the  forest,  the  sea,  the  vicissitudes  of  season  and  of 
climate;  towards  this  ideal  alone  he  has  made  no 
progress.  And  yet  it  is  an  ideal  which,  unlike  per- 
ennial youth  or  immunity  from  pain  and  disease, 
appears  to  be  within  his  power. 

War  has  changed  its  forms.  Tribal  forays  have 
ceased,  and  the  internecine  hatred  of  clans;  but  the 
tribes  and  clans  have  themselves  been  merged  in 
the  higher  unity  of  the  nation  or  the  race,  and  the 
warfares  of  the  clan  and  the  tribe  have  seemed  to 
add  all  their  complexity  and  ferocity  to  the  wars 
of  nations.  That  peculiar  form  of  heroic  warfare 
of  the  Sagas  has  disappeared;  but  the  conditions 
of  life  which  made  it  possible  or  necessary  no 
longer  exist.  Wars  between  city  and  city,  as  those 
between  Genoa  and  Pisa,  Athens  and  Sparta,  have 
also  ceased ;  but  civic  States  have  vanished.  Again, 
the  wars  of  religion  have  ceased ;  but  religion  is  no 
longer  the  dominant  force  in  man's  life.  War  re- 
mains as  the  supreme  act  of  the  State,  unchanged 
in  essence,  though  varying  in  mode.  In  Europe, 
which  really  governs  the  planet,  every  advance  in 
politics  or  religion  has  been  attended  by  war. 


60  PEACE   AND   WAR 

Now  if  one  turns  for  a  moment  from  the  ideal  of 
universal  peace — whether  one  regards  it  as  a  mere 
chimera  or  as  coming  within  the  sphere  of  practical 
politics — to  the  ideal  of  war,  its  history  is  certainly 
illuminating. 

To  the  great  historians  of  Greece,  to  Thucydides, 
for  instance,  the  stern  disciplinarian  of  humanity, 
pfoctoq  BiSdcaxaXoq,  the  most  grave,  the  most  tragic 
and  the  most  philosophic  of  all  historians,  war 
represents  a  permanent  factor  in  human  life,  and 
not  only  a  permanent  factor,  but  a  noble  factor. 
It  is  the  school  of  heroism,  the  exercise-ground  of 
nations,  disciplining  them  in  the  highest  manhood 
— in  valour.  And  this  attitude  of  the  Greek  his- 
torian governs  equally  the  later  Greek  writers, 
such  as  Polybius,  who  come  within  the  dominion 
of  Rome.  For  war  is  at  the  root  of  Roman  history. 
The  Romans  are  the  great  inventors  in  the  art  of 
war ;  they  are  the  first  scientists  in  war ;  and  to  the 
Romans  it  was  not  a  mortal  man  but  a  god  that 
invented  the  formation  of  the  Roman  legion. 

This  attitude  of  Rome  persists  down  to  the 
Middle  Age — though  then,  in  the  Middle  Age,  war 
receives  the  added  glamour  of  religion.  To 
Mohammed  and  to  his  Arabs  in  the  East  war  is  not 
only  in  itself  a  heroism,  it  is  the  divine  act.  And 
in  the  West,  similarly,  in  the  same  period,  you  find 
the  Roman  Papacy  adopting  as  the  very  central 
thought  of  its  foreign  policy  a  great  religious  war — 
the  war  of  the  Crusades.  And  if  at  that  time  you 


JUST  AND  UNJUST  WARS  6l 

do  find  arising  in  Europe  the  notion  of  the  "Truce 
of  God,"  this  Truce  of  God  becomes  simply  the 
institution  of  a  temporary  peace  between  the 
feudal  chiefs  and  barons;  it  is  no  repudiation  of 
war  in  itself. 

The  same  point  of  view  is  maintained  right  on 
to  the  Renaissance  and  Reformation  period.  To 
such  a  thinker  and  writer  as  Machiavelli,  perhaps 
the  most  profound  mind  that  Italy  ever  produced, 
far  wider  in  its  range  of  knowledge  and  speculation 
than  Dante's,  war  is  the  school  of  virttl,  of  valour, 
heroism,  excellence  of  any  kind.  With  the  Refor- 
mation, on  the  other  hand,  a  more  psychological 
investigation  of  war  sets  in.  By  the  very  spirit 
of  the  Reformation  the  Divine  was  declared  to  be 
here  upon  the  earth,  within  man's  reach  and  life, 
and  in  all  human  actions — man's  life  on  earth 
being  now  not  simply  regarded  as  evil.  War 
therefore  had  to  receive  a  closer  examination  and 
an  attempt  had  to  be  made  to  harmonize  it  with 
what  seemed  to  be  the  Divine.  It  is  then  that  the 
distinction  arises  between  just  and  unjust  wars. 
A  great  cause,  a  good  cause,  it  was  said,  justifies 
war  in  the  abstract;  but  he  who  wages  "an  unjust 
war,"  in  the  phrase  of  Grotius,  endures  all  the 
responsibility  for  all  the  vile  actions,  all  the  suffer- 
ing, appertaining  to  that  war. 

Frederick  the  Great,  he  who  above  all  men  exem- 
plified heroism  in  war  in  the  creation  of  that 
War-State  of  Prussia  which  has  gradually  grown 


62  PEACE   AND   WAR 

into  the  German  Empire  of  the  present  hour, 
writes  in  extreme  age  to  Voltaire  a  letter  which  may 
be  taken  as  the  summing-up  of  this  tedious  debate  : 
"I  am  old,  cheerful,  gouty,  good-humoured.  Now 
that  Poland  has  been  settled  by  a  little  ink  and  a 
pen,  the  'Encyclopedic'  cannot  declaim  against 
mercenary  brigands.  For  the  future  I  cannot 
vouch.  Running  over  the  pages  of  history,  I  see 
that  ten  years  never  pass  without  a  war.  This 
intermittent  fever  may  have  moments  of  respite, 
but  cease,  never!"  This  is  the  last  word  of  the 
eighteenth  century  upon  the  dream  of  universal 
peace,  a  word  spoken  by  one  of  the  greatest  kings 
of  any  age. 

Here,  then,  we  are  brought  up  sharply  against 
the  question:  "Is  man's  failure  to  realize  the  ideal 
of  universal  peace  an  arraignment  of  his  capacity 
or  his  sincerity?  Has  he  the  power  to  realize  it  or 
is  it  the  will  that  is  lacking?"  Without  attempt- 
ing further  analysis  and  discussion,  I  am  obliged 
to  answer  that  a  survey  of  world-history — India, 
Babylon,  Persia,  China,  Hellas,  Rome,  the  Middle 
Age  and  Modern  Europe — enforces  the  conclusion 
that  hitherto  man  has  lacked  not  only  the  power 
but  the  will  to  end  war  and  to  establish  peace 
throughout  the  continents  of  the  habitable  globe. 

IV 

Now  it  is  a  question  surely  worth  considering: 
Why  is  it  and  for  what  reward  that  man  still 


GLORY  63 

clings  to  war?  Is  there  anything  in  'war  that  is 
not  wholly  evil?  Or  must  we  be  accused  of  per- 
petual self-contradiction  and  blindness  to  our  own 
interests,  all  down  the  long  six  thousand  years  of 
history?  Or,  on  the  other  hand,  is  there  in  war 
something  which  has  escaped  the  examination  of 
Pacificism,  and  on  what  ground  can  one  maintain 
that  this  is  so? 

First  of  all,  let  me  remind  you  that  in  human 
life  as  a  whole  there  are  always  elements  and 
forces,  there  are  always  motives  and  ideals,  which 
defy  the  analysis  of  reason — mysterious  and  dark 
forces.  Man  shall  not  live  by  bread  alone!  And 
in  war  this  element  constantly  tends  to  assert 
itself.  It  assumes  forms  that  sometimes  are 
dazzling  in  their  beauty;  sometimes  are  wrapt  in 
a  kind  of  transcendental  wonder;  sometimes,  in 
appearance  at  least,  are  simply  utilitarian,  or 
chimerical,  or  fantastic.  But  all  alike  have  this 
quality  of  defying  reason,  of  eluding  the  grasp 
of  the  mind  when  exercised  in  formal  judgment 
merely.  It  is  easy,  for  example,  to  demonstrate 
that  the  glory  of  battle  is  an  illusion;  but  by  the 
same  argument  you  can  demonstrate  that  all 
glory  and  life  itself  is  an  illusion  and  a  mockery. 
Nevertheless  men  still  live  and  go  on  pursuing  that 
illusion  and  that  mockery. 

As  an  illustration  of  what  I  mean  by  that  which 
stands  above  reason,  let  me  speak  to  you  for  a 
moment  of  that  incident  in  the  Antarctic  zone 


64  PEACE  AND  WAR 

which  but  a  few  weeks  ago  was  absorbing  the 
imagination  of  every  man  and  woman  in  these 
islands.  Let  me  speak  to  you  of  Captain  Scott 
and  his  heroic  band,  and  let  us  consider  how  far 
this  element  that  transcends  reason  entered  into 
that  particular  heroism. 

Image  to  yourselves  that  vast,  that  shapeless 
desolation  that  reigns  there  for  ever  around  the 
austral  pole,  league  on  frost-bound  league,  Death's 
appanage,  untainted  by  any  life  eternally,  not  a 
motion  except  the  wild  rage  of  the  tempest  or  the 
silent  fall  of  ice-flakes  through  the  windless  air — a 
desolation  peopled  by  such  phantoms  as  daunted 
even  the  imagination  of  Camoens,  the  poet  of 
Vasco  da  Gama,  the  first  great  adventurer  into 
those  silent  seas.  There,  during  the  past  year, 
month  by  month  the  Polar  sun  forlorn  has  gleamed 
through  the  mists,  month  by  month  through  the 
long  night  the  Southern  Cross  has  hung  her 
glittering  fires  on  the  steep  blackness  of  the  Antarc- 
tic sky,  looking  down  upon  some  little  heaps  of 
English  dust.  Why  have  they  come  hither — these 
Englishmen?  What  is  the  madness  that  has 
drawn  them  from  their  secure  homes  in  Devon- 
shire or  Suffolk,  Ireland  or  the  Welsh  border,  to 
die  thus  agonizing  here?  That  is  the  question 
which,  by  not  too  daring  a  metaphor,  the  Southern 
Cross  might  ask  as  through  that  long  night  she 
looks  down  upon  the  English  dead  extended  there 
in  frozen  rigidity  unmoving.  To  what  possible 


THE   DEATH   OF   HEROES  65 

end  have  they  come  there?  Assuredly  for  no  mere 
utilitarian  end.  The  lure  that  has  led  them  to 
their  glory  and  their  rest  is  Reason  indeed,  the 
increase  of  Knowledge,  but  something  higher  also. 
Mere  love  of  formal  Knowledge — questions  as  to 
the  precise  position  of  the  South  Pole,  or  whether 
the  fossils  of  an  extinct  race  of  animals  which  once 
wandered  there  are  preserved  in  the  rocks  and 
stones — would  never  have  inspired  that  drama. 

For  put  before  yourselves,  incident  by  incident, 
the  later  stages  of  that  heroism — first  the  careful 
survey  on  the  Pole  itself,  hour  by  priceless  hour 
a  hostage  to  death,  then  the  terrible  return  with 
the  sick  comrade,  his  death,  and  then  that  strange 
heroism  on  the  part  of  Captain  Gates.  As  a  his- 
torian or  at  least  a  student  of  history,  let  me  dwell 
for  a  moment  on  the  distinction  of  this  valour.  In 
the  Icelandic  Sagas  of  the  Middle  Age,  which  re- 
flect in  a  very  remarkable  manner  the  English  char- 
acter of  that  time  although  they  were  not  written 
by  Englishmen,  you  find  a  certain  kind  of  courage 
frequently  delineated — the  courage  shown,  say, 
in  the  great  fight  to  avenge  the  death  of  Kjartan, 
where  one  man  after  another,  when  they  have 
surrounded  the  house  where  the  enemy  is  en- 
trenched, volunteers  to  be  the  first  to  attack  the 
house  and  meet  death.  But  in  the  death  of 
Captain  Gates  a  valour  of  quite  a  different  kind 
displays  itself.  In  that  courage  you  have  some- 
thing spiritual,  mysterious,  added  to  this  other 


66  PEACE   AND   WAR 

courage  of  the  Sagas — something  which  leads  that 
English  gentleman  to  set  forth  solitary  into  the 
terror-haunted  darkness,  seeking  no  visible  enemy, 
seeking  only  the  universal  enemy,  to  him  a  friend — 
death,  death;  stumbling  blindly,  yet  onwards  and 
still  onwards  into  the  night,  into  Annihilation, 
fronting  it .... 

And  then  pass  to  the  last  stage  in  the  drama^to 
that  other  death.  There  in  the  tent  beside  his 
dead  the  leader  sits,  still  alive;  there  he  sits,  un- 
vanquished  and  unappalled,  his  head  propped 
against  the  tent-pole  to  ease  his  fatigue  in  the  last 
slow  dreadful  vigil,  whilst  down  over  his  magnifi- 
cently English  features  a  night  deeper  than  the 
Polar  night  descends.  And  what  are  the  thoughts 
which  then  flicker  in  front  of  him?  We  know 
them;  we  .have  them  written  in  his  own  hand  in 
that  priceless  record — priceless  because  authentic. 
"The  greatness  of  England — my  nation!"  It  is 
the  greatness  of  England  which  uplifts  him  as 
death  steals  over  his  features  like  a  marble  mask. 

Here,  surely,  we  have  a  kind  of  heroism  which  it 
would  daunt  the  courage  of  any  pacificist,  of  any 
doctrinaire,  to  explain  by  the  profit  and  loss  theory 
or  to  analyze  by  the  ordinary  processes  of  reason 
at  all. 

Now  I  suggest  to  you  that  one  explanation  of 
this  extraordinary  paradox  in  human  history — the 
persistence  of  war  in  spite  of  what  seems  its  un- 
reason— is  that  there  is  something  in  war,  after 


NATIONAL  WARS  IN  ENGLAND         67 

all,  that  is  analogous  to  this  heroism  there  in  the 
Antarctic  zone,  something  that  transcends  reason ; 
that  in  war  and  the  right  of  war  man  has  a  pos- 
session which  he  values  above  religion,  above 
industry  and  above  social  comforts;  that  in  war 
man  values  the  power  which  it  affords  to  life  of 
rising  above  life,  the  power  which  the  spirit  of 
man  possesses  to  pursue  the  Ideal.  In  all  life  at 
its  height,  in  thought,  art,  and  action,  there  is  a 
tendency  to  become  transcendental;  and  if  we 
examine  the  wars  of  England  or  of  Germany  in 
the  past  we  find  governing  these  wars  throughout 
this  higher  power  of  heroism,  or  of  something,  at 
least,  which  transcends  reason. 

Until  about  five  hundred  years  ago  England  can 
hardly  be  said  to  have  fought  as  a  nation.  Her 
wars  till  then  represent  rather  the  heroism  of 
dynasties  and  of  individual  groups  of  men  than  the 
heroism  of  the  nation  as  such.  But  towards  the 
middle  of  the  fourteenth  century  there  began  a 
series  of  really  national  wars  in  England — the  wars 
against  France,  with  their  great  battles  of  Crecy 
and  Agincourt,  and  the  great  disaster,  the  hour 
when  with  Talbot  at  Castillon  an  empire  sank. 
Then  there  is  the  war  against  Spain  in  the  six- 
teenth century,  and  in  the  seventeenth  the  wars 
against  Holland  and  the  France  of  Louis  XIV, 
which  continue  into  the  eighteenth  century  and 
find  their  natural  termination  only  in  the  wars 
against  Napoleon.  In  the  nineteenth  century 


68  PEACE   AND   WAR 

there  is  a  long  series  of  wars  in  all  parts  of  the  world 
—in  the  Crimea,  in  India  and  Afghanistan,  in 
China,  in  New  Zealand,  in  Egypt,  in  Western  and  in 
Southern  Africa;  so  that  it  might  be  said  without 
exaggeration  that  through  all  these  years  scarcely 
a  sun  set  which  did  not  look  upon  some  English- 
man's face  dead  in  battle — dead  for  England! 

Now  for  what  have  these  wars  been  fought? 
Can  one  detect  underneath  them  any  governing 
idea,  controlling  them  from  first  to  last?  I  answer 
at  once:  There  is  such  an  idea,  and  that  idea  is 
the  idea  of  Empire.  All  England's  wars  for  the 
past  five  hundred  years  have  been  fought  for 
empire.  There  is  first  of  all  a  war  for  an  empire  in 
France — a  wholly  unrealizable  idea,  a  war  bound 
to  end  in  failure  in  the  very  nature  of  things,  and 
yet  a  war  to  which  the  English  nation  gave  itself 
with  a  splendour  of  courage,  a  lavishness  at  once 
of  blood  and  treasure,  that  still  fills  the  mind  with 
admiration  and  lifts  it  beyond  those  utilitarian 
speculations  to  which  I  have  referred. 

That  war  ends  in  disaster;  and  just  at  the 
moment  when  that  disaster  is  most  complete, 
when  it  seems  as  if  England  were  doomed  to  fall 
to  a  secondary  or  even  a  tertiary  place  in  world- 
history,  suddenly  there  occurs  that  event  which 
it  is  hard  not  to  ascribe  to  some  deeper  cause  than 
chance,  to  some  profounder  purpose  than  the 
hazard  in  things.  It  is  the  discovery  of  the  means 
to  a  greater  empire  than  the  empire  in  France,  to 


THE   IDEA  OF  EMPIRE  69 

an  empire  at  once  in  the  sunrise  and  in  the  sunset. 
It  is  America:  it  is  India.  The  effect  of  this  dis- 
covery is  like  the  awakening  of  a  sleeper.  A  new 
hope  for  Englishmen  arises,  and  now  the  English 
imagination  is  fired  and  filled  with  this  idea,  so 
that  throughout  the  whole  of  English  life,  in 
every  phase  and  grade  of  it,  there  is  that  exaltation, 
that  spiritual  exultancy  which  finds  its  supreme 
expression  in  the  Elizabethan  drama,  in  the  great 
dramatists  of  that  time,  in  Marlowe  and  Shake- 
speare and  Ford,  in  Webster,  in  Beaumont  and 
Fletcher,  in  that  outburst  of  thought  and  of  art 
which  has  no  parallel  in  world-history — not  in 
Greece  itself,  unless  possibly  for  a  moment  in  the 
age  of  Pericles. * 

This  war  for  empire  again  finds  expression  in 
the  conflict  with  Spain,  in  the  wars  against  Holland 
and  France  in  the  seventeenth  and  eighteenth 
centuries.  And  what  was  the  stake  for  which 
England  fought  in  all  her  battles  against  Bona- 
parte ?  The  stake  was  world-empire ;  and  Napoleon 
knew  it  well.  France's  opportunity  was  now,  or 
her  world-empire  was  lost  for  ever.  Bonaparte 
fought  for  that,  and  fought  for  it  titanically  and 
superbly;  and  dying  there  in  Sainte-Hel£ne  there 
died  with  him  a  world-hope. 

1  Even  there  it  is  less  rich  and  varied  in  poetry;  although,  on 
the  other  hand,  the  glory  of  the  Parthenon,  of  sculpture,  belongs 
to  Greece  alone.  That  is  the  inalienable  and  for  ever  precious 
gift  of  Hellas. 


70  PEACE  AND  WAR 

Here  then  we  have  this  transcendental  force 
governing  the  wars  of  England.  And  if  we  turn 
from  England  to  Germany  we  find  the  same  ele- 
ment which  transcends  reason  governing  the  wars 
of  Germany.  One  emperor  after  another  is  led 
south  across  the  Alps  in  the  attempt  to  make 
Italy  a  part  of  Germany;  to  govern  Italy,  and 
therefore  the  Papacy,  from  the  Rhine;  to  make  a 
reality  of  that  which  was  called  the  "Holy  Roman 
Empire" — an  attempt  doomed  to  disaster,  just 
as  England  was  doomed  to  disaster  on  the  fields 
of  France,  a  perfectly  hopeless  dream!  Yet  what 
heroism,  what  courage,  what  names!  It  is  to 
those  names  and  to  that  heroic  past  that  Germans 
turn  for  inspiration  as  year  by  year  this  newer 
hope  of  empire  arising  within  the  German  mind 
deepens. 

This  dream  of  empire  continues  in  her  later  wars. 
******* 

[NOTE. — This  section  was  left  unfinished.  A  survey 
of  the  wars  of  Germany  in  the  light  of  this  idea 
is  evidently  the  line  on  which  it  would  have  been 
continued,  but  unfortunately  the  lecturer  left 
no  notes  which  could  be  used  to  finish  the 
section.] 

V 

Now  considering  the  wars  of  England  and  of 
Germany  in  this  light,  considering  also  the  respec- 
tive positions  of  these  two  nations  at  the  present 


EFFECTS  OF  PACIFICISM  71 

day,  what  is  likely  to  be  the  comparative  effect  on 
England  and  Germany  of  Pacificism  with  its  de- 
nial of  the  part  played  by  danger  and  by  suffering 
in  all  heroic  life? 

Upon  a  young  and  virile  nation,  a  rising  military 
State,  daily  growing  in  power,  Pacificism  can 
never  exert  much  influence  for  evil;  there  is  no 
possibility  of  such  a  nation  being  seriously  turned 
from  heroism.  But  to  an  old  nation  in  which 
certain  forces  of  decay  seem,  at  least,  already  to 
be  manifesting  themselves,  might  not  such  a 
theory,  if  too  ardently  adopted,  be  fraught  with 
very  terrible  danger,  with  very  real  and  disastrous 
consequences? 

In  regard  to  Germany  we  are  confronted  by 
certain  circumstances  that  indisputably  merit  our 
consideration  here  in  England.  There  is,  for 
instance,  the  annual  appearance  in  Germany  of 
very  nearly  seven  hundred  books  dealing  with 
war  as  a  science.  This  points,  at  once,  to  an 
extreme  preoccupation  in  that  nation  with  the 
idea  of  war.  I  doubt  whether  twenty  books  a 
year  on  the  art  of  war  appear  in  this  country, 
and  whether  their  circulation,  when  they  do  ap- 
pear, is  much  more  than  twenty ! 

There  is,  again,  the  German  way  of  regarding 
war.  What  is  the  attitude  of  mind  towards  war 
of  Treitschke,  for  example,  a  man  whose  spirit 
still  controls  German  youth,  German  patriotism, 
a  man  who  has  a  power  in  Germany,  as  a  thinker 


72  PEACE  AND  WAR 

and  as  a  writer,  that  you  might  compare  to  the 
power  exercised  by  Carlyle  and  by  Macaulay  put 
together  in  this  country?  To  him  the  army  is 
simply  the  natural  expression  of  the  vital  forces 
of  the  nation ;  and  just  as  those  vital  forces  of  the 
nation  increase  so  shall  the  German  army  and 
the  German  navy  increase.  A  nation's  military 
efficiency  is  the  exact  coefficient  of  a  nation's 
idealism.  That  is  Treitschke's  solution  of  the 
matter.  His  answer  to  all  our  talk  about  the 
limitation  of  armaments  is:  Germany  shall  in- 
crease to  the  utmost  of  her  power,  irrespective  of 
any  proposals  made  to  her  by  England  or  by 
Russia,  or  by  any  other  State  upon  this  earth. 
And  I  confess  it  is  a  magnificent  and  a  manly 
answer,  an  answer  worthy  of  a  man  whose  spirit 
of  sincerity,  of  regard  for  the  reality  of  things,  is 
as  great  as  Carlyle's. 

The  teaching  of  Treitschke's  disciple,  General 
von  Bernhardi,  is  the  same.  War  to  him  is  a  duty. 
Nothing  is  more  terrible  than  the  government  of 
the  strong  by  the  weak,  and  war  is  the  power  by 
which  the  strong  assert  their  dominion  over  the 
weak.  War  sets  the  balance  right.  And  the 
younger  poets  of  Germany  breathe  the  same 
spirit — Liliencron,  for  instance,  who  represents 
most  fitly  that  aspect  of  modern  German  litera- 
ture. I  have  not  time  at  this  late  hour  to  speak 
of  him  so  fully  as  I  had  hoped ;  but  that  spirit  of 
war  and  glory  which  informs  his  battle-sketches 


PEACE  THROUGH  VICTORY  73 

of  the  war  of  1870 — I  can  sum  it  up  for  you.     It 
is  in  the  verses  of  Goethe's  Euphorion: 

"Traumt  ihr  den  Friedenstag? 
Traume,  wer  traumen  mag! 
Krieg  ist  das  Losungswort! 
Sieg!  und  so  klingt  es  fort."1 

That  is  the  spirit  in  which  war  is  regarded  in 
contemporary  Germany.  And  I  am  not  the  least 
astonished  that  when  we  send  over  from  England 
an  itinerant  preacher  of  universal  peace  to  explain 
to  Germany,  "For  the  love  of  God,  don't  make 
war  upon  England;  for  it  won't  pay  you" — I  am 
not  the  least  astonished  that  in  a  mass  meeting  of 
two  thousand  students  at  the  university  of  Gottin- 
gen  this  itinerant  preacher  and  all  his  works  were 
set  aside.  How  can  we  wonder  at  it? 

England  and  Germany — on  which  is  Pacificism 
likelier  to  exercise  a  deleterious  and  a  dangerous 
effect?  From  to-day's  survey  of  eternal  abstract 
principles,  as  from  last  week's  survey  of  ephemeral 
yet  not  insignificant  criticism  of  England  and  her 
empire,  it  becomes  apparent  that  Germany  is  not 
England's  only  enemy,  perhaps  not  even  her  chief. 

And  yet,  and  yet — from  those  frozen  regions  of 
the  South  there  seems  to  come,  like  a  trumpet-call, 

1  "  Dream  ye  of  peaceful  sway? 
Dream  on,  who  dream  it  may. 
War  still  is  empire's  word ! 
Peace?     By  the  victor's  sword!" 


74  PEACE  AND  WAR 

the  message:  The  greatness  of  England  still,  the 
greatness  of  England  still! — England,  for  which 
men  can  die  as  these  men  died,  with  a  valour  that 
is  higher  than  the  valour  of  the  past — a  message 
reinforcing  again  those  words  of  the  Athenian 
which  at  this  crisis  of  our  fate  I  would  to  God  rang 
in  every  Englishman's  ears  and  were  graven  on 
every  Englishman's  heart:  "Yet  is  there  time, 
O  Athenians,  yet  is  there  time!  Cease  to  hire 
your  armies ;  cease  to  fill  your  ranks  with  the  off- 
scourings of  a  planet.  Go  yourselves  and  stand  in 
the  ranks;  and  then,  dying,  you  shall  die  greatly 
and  with  a  glory  that  shall  surpass  the  glories  of 
the  past,  or,  victorious,  you  shall  gain  a  victory 
that  shall  exceed  all  your  victories  in  the  past!" 


LECTURE  III 

TREITSCHKE  AND  YOUNG  GERMANY 


TOWARDS  the  end  of  last  September  I  was  stay- 
ing in  an  hotel  at  a  watering-place  in  the  Midlands 
when,  on  a  Tuesday  evening,  there  came  the  news 
of  the  death  of  the  German  ambassador,  Count 
Bieberstein,  here  in  London.  The  incident  made 
on  me  an  unsual  impression,  for  it  seemed  but 
yesterday  that  he  had  arrived  amongst  us,  over- 
flowing with  energy,  animated,  versatile,  a  mind 
full  of  the  future.  His  coming  had  instantly 
greatened  all  our  political  life;  for,  in  the  defect 
of  even  second-rate  statesmen  amongst  ourselves, 
the  presence  of  a  man  who,  if  he  did  not  actually 
attain  the  first  rank,  certainly  suggested  the  first 
rank,  had  given  a  kind  of  dignity  and  meaning  to 
political  life  such  as  it  had  hardly  known  since  the 
death  of  Lord  Salisbury.  Now,  as  by  a  stroke 
from  the  gods,  that  influence  was  withdrawn.  The 
sense  of  magnitude  was  gone,  and  the  busy  medioc- 
rity, the  hustler,  and  the  charlatan,  corrupting  and 
corrupt,  again  moved  about  in  unrelieved  oppres- 
siveness. Those  grave  features  with  their  Puritan 

75 


76    TREITSCHKE  AND  YOUNG  GERMANY 

severity  of  line  we  should  see  no  more ;  his  plans, 
his  designs,  were  left  an  enigma.  He  had  died 
before  the  great  distaste  and  the  great  weariness 
had  come  upon  him.  To.  Bismarck  and  to  Stein, 
as  to  Frederick  the  Great,  life  had  long  been 
infinitely  contemptible,  the  purpose  and  the  end 
of  existence  a  hieroglyph  written  in  mud.  But 
Bieberstein  had  died  under  the  everlasting  illu- 
sion, believing  that  he  was  doing  something, 
realizing  some  end,  and  that  therefore  some 
end  could  be  realized. 

And  in  the  lounge  after  dinner,  amid  the  gossip 
of  the  day,  there  carne  little  splutters  of  intelligent. 
or  unintelligent  comment  on  the  event;  and  as  I 
sat  listening  to  these  epitaphs  a  lady  turned  to 
me,  and  casting  down  her  face  and  then  casting 
up  her  eyes  with  a  perfect  expression  of  innate  and 
indescribable  hypocrisy,  observed:  "You  do  not 
say  anything.  Ah  well,  the  news  is,  of  course,  sad, 
but  we  cannot  perhaps  altogether  grieve  that  he 
was  taken.  He  was  dreadfully  against  England, 
was  he  not?"  "Ah,  madam,"  I  answered,  "the 
death  of  a  great  man  is  a  loss  to  humanity,  what- 
ever be  his  antagonisms  or  his  sympathies;  and, 
after  all,  next  to  a  true  friend  the  possession  of  a 
great  and  magnanimous  enemy  is  perhaps  the 
most  precious  gift  the  gods  can  send  us."  She 
wrinkled  her  brows;  for  she  imagined,  I  suppose, 
that  by  "the  gods"  I  meant  the  Anglican  bishops, 
and  was  perplexed. 


TREITSCHKE  77 

An  enemy  of  England?  I  am  not  certain  that 
this  is  a  just  estimate  of  Count  Bieberstein,  but  it 
is  assuredly  a  fair  description  of  the  man  concern- 
ing whom  I  have  to  speak  to  you  this  afternoon, 
Heinrich  von  Treitschke. 

Almost  the  last  time  we  see  Treitschke,  those 
noble  features  of  his  lit  up,  as  they  always  were 
instantly  lit  up  by  any  enthusiasm,  whether  of 
love  or  hate — almost  the  last  time  we  really  see 
him  is  on  an  evening  in  1895,  when,  returned  from 
a  visit  to  England,  he  poured  out  to  a  company  of 
friends  all  the  vitriol  of  his  scorn,  antipathy  and 
hate  for  England  and  for  the  English,  enduring  no 
word  of  comment  or  contradiction,  until  someone 
quoted  to  him  Heine's  malicious  "Englische  Frag- 
mente,"  in  which  Heine  discusses  the  question  how 
it  is  that  so  ignoble  a  nation  as  England  can 
possibly  have  produced  a  Shakespeare.  And  so 
the  meeting  ended  in  agreement  and  laughter. 
But  all  who  listened  to  Treitschke  that  night 
seemed  to  hear  in  his  words,  as  they  had  heard  in 
his  lectures  again  and  again,  the  first  dark  roll  that 
announces  the  coming  dreadful  storm,  the  coming 
war — the  war  that  he  regarded  as  simply  inevitable 
—between  these  two  empires,  both  the  descendants 
of  the  war-god  Odin,  and  yet,  because  of  that, 
doomed  to  this  great  conflict. 

Within  six  months  Treitschke  was  dead. 


78     TREITSCHKE  AND  YOUNG  GERMANY 

II 

How  can  one  best  present  Treitschke  to  an  Eng- 
lish audience?  How  can  one  explain  to  an  English 
audience  something  of  Treitschke's  position  and 
the  place  he  fills  in  German  life  right  on  from  1858 
until  his  death,  and  to  the  present  hour?  The 
seventeen  volumes  of  his  collected  writings  on 
history,  on  literature  and  on  the  science  of  politics, 
his  speeches  on  present-day  questions  and  his 
political  pamphlets,  have  not  been  translated  and 
are  therefore  a  sealed  book  to  the  majority  of 
English  readers. 

Yet  at  once  in  his  own  personality  and  as  a 
governing  force  in  German  thought,  Heinrich  von 
Treitschke  ought  to  be  deeply  interesting  to  us; 
for  more  than  any  other  single  character  in  German 
political  life  he  is  responsible  for  the  anti-English 
sentiment  which  blazed  out  during  the  Boer  War, 
which  still  reigns  in  German  society  and  in  the 
German  Press,  which  in  the  Reichstag  reveals  itself 
in  the  frigid  or  ironic  applause  with  which  any 
references  to  "our  amicable  relations  with  Eng- 
land" are  greeted.  The  foundations  of  that 
sentiment,  of  course,  lie  deeper  than  the  creative 
power  of  an  individual  intellect  or  will.  They  are, 
as  we  have  seen,  beyond  the  control  of  any  passing 
generation,  rooting  themselves  in  the  dark  forces 
which  determine  the  destinies  of  peoples  and  of 
the  universe  itself.  But  Treitschke,  beyond  any 


ENGLAND'S  SEA-SUPREMACY          79 

other  German,  stands  forth  as  the  interpreter  of 
these  forces.  His  interpretations  have  sunk  deep 
into  the  German  mind;  his  fiery  challenges  and 
impassioned  rhetoric  have  coloured  German 
thought.  Though  his  greatest  book  deals  only 
with  the  record  of  thirty-two  years,  it  is  spoken  of 
sans  phrase  as  "the  History  of  Germany,"1  and 
"our  great  national  historian"  has  become  a 
familiar  periphrasis  in  newspapers  and  on  plat- 
forms for  Treitschke's  name.  The  real  and 
abstract  principles  of  German  history  seen  and 
reinterpreted  through  Treitschke's  medium — that 
for  many  men  in  Germany  has  become  their  faith. 
These  are  arguments  of  a  unique  and  immense 
influence.  And  what  are  the  feelings  towards 
England  which  this  great  historian  and  orator 
expresses?  He  incessantly  points  his  nation  on- 
wards to  the  war  with  England,  to  the  destruction 
of  England's  supremacy  at  sea  as  the  means  by 
which  Germany  is  to  burst  into  that  path  of  glory 
and  of  world-dominion  towards  which,  through  all 
the  centuries  of  her  history,  she  has  deliberately 
moved.  The  Ottonides  in  the  tenth  century 
sketched  the  plan;  it  has  been  reserved  for  the 
Hohenzollern  in  the  twentieth  to  fill  in  the  details. 

'The  subject  of  Treitschke's  "Deutsche  Geschichte"  is  the 
transformation  of  the  German  Confederation  into  the  Empire; 
but  he  had  only  reached  the  year  1848  when,  at  the  age  of  62, 
he  died.  His  "  History  "  may  be  regarded  as  the  analogue  of 
Pertz's  "Life  of  Stein." 


8o    TREITSCHKE  AND  YOUNG  GERMANY 

Discussing  in  a  former  lecture  the  question 
whether  the  persistence  of  war  accused  humanity 
of  self-contradiction  or  some  secular  hypocrisy  t 
I  suggested  that  in  the  laws  governing  States  and 
individuals  the  highest  functions  transcend  utility 
and  transcend  even  reason  itself ;  that  in  the  present 
stage  of  the  world's  history  to  end  war  is  not  only 
beyond  man's  power  but  contrary  to  man's  will, 
since  in  war  there  is  some  secret  possession  or 
lingering  human  glory  to  which  man  clings  with  an 
unchangeable  persistence,  some  source  of  inspira- 
tion which  he  is  afraid  to  lose,  uplifting  life  beyond 
life  itself,  some  sense  of  a  redeeming  task  which, 
like  his  efforts  to  unriddle  the  universe,  for  ever 
baffled  yet  for  ever  renewed,  gives  a  meaning  to 
this  else  meaningless  scheme  of  things. 

A  Greek  orator  has  recorded  an  incident  in 
the  life  of  the  Emperor  Julian,  when,  confronting 
certain  Teutonic  tribes  along  the  Rhine,  he  remon- 
strated with  them  on  their  restless,  predatory  and 
warlike  habits,  and  one  of  their  ambassadors, 
answering  the  charge,  summed  up  his  defence  with 
the  assertion:  "But  in  war  itself  we  see  life's 
greatest  felicity."  And  five  centuries  of  almost 
uninterrupted  war  forged  the  unity  of  England. 
But  no  English  historian  or  thinker  has  spoken  of 
war  quite  as  Treitschke  has  spoken  of  it.  I  do  not 
recollect  a  single  passage  in  his  writings  in  which 
the  conventional  regrets  are  expressed,  or  where 
conventional  phrases  such  as  "the  scourge  of 


WAR  A  NECESSITY  81 

mankind,"  "the  barrier  to  human  progress," 
occur  as  descriptions  of  war.  From  an  early  period 
in  his  literary  career,  on  the  other  hand,  phrases 
of  a  quite  different  order  abound  in  his  writings, 
phrases  in  which  war  appears,  if  not  as  "the  su- 
preme felicity  of  mankind,"  at  least  as  a  great 
factor  in  the  onward  strife  towards  perfection; 
whilst  any  attempt  at  its  abolition  is  characterized 
as  unwise  and  immoral. 

When  General  von  Bernhardi,  in  a  pamphlet 
published  in  February  last,  ("Unsere  Zukunft: 
ein  Mahnwort  an  das  deutsche  Volk"),  puts  before 
his  countrymen  the  alternatives  of  world-dominion 
or  ruin,  when  he  speaks  of  war  as  a  biological 
necessity  and  as  an  extension  of  policy,  and  the 
manliest  extension,  he  is  expressing,  perhaps  not 
in  the  happiest  literary  manner,  Treitschke's  ideas. 
The  poet  Liliencron,  Treitschke's  contemporary, 
has  expressed  them  much  more  happily,  much  more 
fervently;  and  Liliencron  was  a  poet  with  a  sword 
by  his  side.  He  fought  at  Koniggratz  in  1866,  at 
the  age  of  thirty-two,  and  at  Worth  and  Mars-la- 
Tour  in  1 870.  And  what  is  a  governing  thought  of 
Liliencron's  battle-sketches,  of  "Der  Richtungs- 
punct,"  for  instance,  or  of  "  Eine  Sommerschlacht," 
except  the  thought  of  Faust : 

"O  selig  der,  dem  er  im  Siegesglanze 
Die  blut'gen  Lorbeern  um  die  Schlafe  windet.  "* 

1  "  O  happy  he  for  whom  in  victory's  splendour 

Death  wreathes  the  blood-stained  laurel  round  his  brow." 
6 


82     TREITSCHKE  AND  YOUNG  GERMANY 

There  is  no  greater  contrast  in  literature  than 
between  the  emotion  which  pervades  Tolstoi's 
"War  and  Peace,"  the  scene,  say,  on  the  redan  in  the 
description  of  Borodino,  and  the  emotion  which 
pervades  Liliencron's  descriptions  of  Worth  and 
Mars-la-Tour.  And,  again  I  must  remind  you, 
Liliencron  not  less  than  Tolstoi  knew  what  he 
was  talking  about. 


Ill 


IN  his  own  country  Treitschke  is  sometimes  de- 
scribed as  the  Coryphaeus  of  the  Prussian  School, 
that  group  of  historians  of  whom  Droysen,  Hausser 
and  Sybel,  Pertz,  the  biographer  of  Stein,  and 
Delbruck,  the  biographer  of  Gneisenau,  are  per- 
haps the  best-known  names  in  this  country.  The 
greatness  of  Prussia  and  the  fate-appointed  world- 
task  or  world-mission  of  Germany  under  the 
sacred  dynasty  of  the  Hohenzollern  is  the  inspira- 
tion of  all  these  men. 

Treitschke's  "  History"  is  characterized  by  punc- 
tilious research  and  by  reliance  on  original  docu- 
ments and  original  documents  only.  There  are 
brilliant  chapters  on  literature  and  the  inter- 
connexion of  literature  and  history.  Here  he  sug- 
gests Taine,  his  contemporary;  and,  had  he  lived 
another  ten  years,  his  book  might  have  been  styled 
"  The  Foundations  of  Contemporary  Germany." 
English  critics  have  sometimes  compared  him  with 


TREITSCHKE   AND   MACAULAY         83 

Macaulay.  Treitschke  himself  would  have  re- 
sented the  comparison;  for  he  has  frequently 
expressed  his  unreserved  contempt  for  the  historian 
of  the  Revolution  of  1688,  arraigned  his  accuracy, 
derided  his  estimates  of  men,  challenged  his 
appreciation  of  facts,  and  stigmatized  his  philo- 
sophy and  his  outlook  upon  human  fate.  He  has 
Macaulay's  hates  and  prejudices,  his  vituperative 
energy;  he  has  his  power  of  fervent  admiration. 
Yet  as  a  master  of  words,  a  stylist,  Treitschke  is 
much  inferior  to  Macaulay.  His  portraiture  is 
often  an  accumulation  of  minute  details  which  have 
never  coalesced  into  a  living  personality.  A  Titian 
portrait  beside  a  Bronzino — that  is  the  quality  of 
Macaulay's  style  beside  Treitschke's :  for  instance 
the  portraits  of  the  Whig  Junto  beside  those  of 
the  men  in  whom  Frederick  William  IV  put  his 
trust.  Treitschke  at  one  time  had  wished  to  be  a 
poet,  and  he  had  considerable  metrical  skill.  Yet 
in  speaking  of  poetry  he  is  rarely  a  poet;  and  a 
comparison  of  his  patriotic  verses  with  "The  Lays 
of  Ancient  Rome  "  is  a  fair  measure  of  Treitschke's 
inferiority  to  Macaulay  as  a  writer. * 

1  Nietzsche  as  a  stylist  might  have  taught  Treitschke  much; 
but  against  the  creator  of  Zarathustra  Treitschke  was  bitterly  and 
irreconcilably  prejudiced  from  the  very  beginning  of  the  former's 
career,  when  Treitschke  wrote  of  him  to  Overbeck  as  "  that  rum 
fellow  Nietzsche. "  He  even  quarrelled  with  Overbeck  because  of 
the  latter's  sympathy  with  his  young  colleague  at  Basle.  His 
roughness  to  Nietzsche  in  1872  is  not  worse  than  Stein's  roughness 
to  Goethe,  and  arose  from  similar  causes.  Treitschke  divines  in 


84    TREITSCHKE  AND  YOUNG  GERMANY 

On  the  other  hand,  one  may  more  justly  compare 
Treitschke's  immense  and  enduring  influence,  not 
only  in  Prussia  but  throughout  the  German  world, 
with  the  influence  exercised  by  Carlyle  upon 
England  since  1858.*  And  Treitschke's  influence 
has  gone  on  steadily  increasing  throughout  Ger- 
many until  the  present  -day.  Treitschke  and 
Carlyle  resemble  each  other  in  their  high  serious- 
ness, sincerity,  downrightness  and  deep  moral 
strength.  Do  not  imagine,  however,  that  there 
is  any  further  resemblance  between  them.  For 
instance,  there  is  not  in  all  the  seventeen  volumes 
of  Treitschke  any  hint  of  that  broad  human 
laughter  which  you  find  in  very  nearly  every  page 
of  the  thirty  volumes  of  Carlyle.  In  all  Treitschke 
I  doubt  whether  there  is  a  single  laugh.  You  may 
say,  if  you  like,  that  this  is  because  Germany  has 
obtained  free  political  institutions  so  recently  and 
therefore  has  not  yet  acquired  the  power  to  take 
them  humorously! 

Treitschke,  observe,  is  nothing  if  not  a  politician. 


the  author  of  " Unzeitgemasse  Betrachtungen "  "the  good  Euro- 
pean" of  later  works;  and  therefore  the  bad  Prussian,  the  bad 
German. 

1  Carlyle  was  born  forty  years  before  Treitschke,  but  Carlyle 's 
influence  was  slower  in  making  itself  felt;  he  was  very  late  in 
coming  to  his  own  in  English  life,  very  late  in  acquiring  his  reputa- 
tion. The  first  thing  that  gave  Carlyle  a  grip  upon  English  people 
was  not  "The  French  Revolution,"  published  by  him  at  two- 
and-forty,  but  his  "Cromwell,"  published  at  fifty.  Treitschke's 
influence  at  the  universities  dates  from  fifteen  years  after  that. 


TREITSCHKE  AND  CARLYLE  85 

Carlyle,  in  a  sense,  has  no  politics.  Certainly 
England  never  took  Carlyle's  politics  seriously. 
England  listened  wondering,  sometimes  amazed, 
but  always  reverent,  to  his  moral  teaching.  Every 
book  he  wrote  seemed  to  prove  the  truth  of 
Goethe's  diagnosis  of  his  character — "a  new  moral 
force,  the  extent  and  effects  of  which  it  is  impos- 
sible to  predict."  But  England  has  ignored  ab- 
solutely Carlyle's  politics,  whether  in  his  attitude 
towards  the  American  War,  or  again  in  "Shooting 
Niagara,"  or  in  "Latter  Day  Pamphlets,"  or  in 
his  view  of  the  careers  of  Cromwell  or  Frederick — 
that  exaltation  of  beneficent  despotism.  Treitsch- 
ke's  political  principles,  on  the  other  hand — 
the  doing  of  great  things  greatly,  heroic  action, 
the  glory  of  war,  and  the  day  of  reckoning  with 
England — are  the  very  essence  of  his  power  over 
Germany.  These  principles  underlie  some  of  the 
soundest  German,  and,  above  all,  Prussian  thought 
at  the  present  hour,  as  they  have  for  the  last 
thirty  years. 

A  further  contrast  between  these  two  men  is 
this.  Treitschke  is  ethical  rather  than  meta- 
physical. He  has  none  of  those  dazzling  gleams 
of  profound  metaphysical  thought  which  con- 
stantly uplift  Carlyle.  Nor  do  you  find  in  him  the 
poetry  of  Nature  which  you  find  in  Carlyle — that 
feeling  which  gives  Carlyle  the  power  to  turn  from 
the  massacres  there  in  the  streets  of  Paris  to  the 
fall  of  the  autumn  evening  over  French  meadows. 


86    TREITSCHKE  AND  YOUNG  GERMANY 

You  do  find,  however,  something  of  Carlyle's 
vivid  insight  into  character,  especially  when 
Treitschke  has  the  power  of  loving  his  characters 
(and  unless  a  man  loves  his  characters  he  should 
not  write  about  them).  This  is  noticeable  in  his 
incursions  into  English  history,  and  even  more  in 
his  studies  of  English  literature.  His  sketch  of 
Milton  is  still  one  of  the  very  finest  of  that  great 
man;  and  his  sketch  of  Byron  might  quite  easily 
be  placed  with  that  of  the  Spanish  writer,  Nunez 
de  Arce.  But,  again,  that  which  appeals  to 
Treitschke  in  Milton  is  the  great  political  rebel. 
It  is  not  the  writer  of  the  fourth  book  of  "Paradise 
Lost,"  or  of  the  first,  or  of  the  ninth,  or  of  the 
eleventh;  it  is  the  author  of  that  noble  pamphlet, 
"The  Tenure  of  Kings  and  Magistrates,"  which 
Milton  sat  writing  in  the  very  week  when  Charles 
I  was  being  tried  and  doomed  to  death,  Milton 
feeling  it  incumbent  upon  himself  as  an  English- 
man, though  he  is  not  a  member  of  that  high  court 
of  justice,  to  sit  there  day  by  day  and  night  by 
night  trying  Charles  I,  as  he  maintained  that 
every  Englishman  should  try  the  king.  So  again, 
to  Treitschke,  with  his  deep  Teutonic  moral 
nature,  it  certainly  is  not  the  Byron  of  what,  from 
a  literary  standpoint,  is  Byron's  masterpiece, 
"  Don  Juan, "  nor  is  it  the  poet  of  "  Childe  Harold  " 
that  fascinates  him.  It  is  Byron's  admiration  and 
enthusiasm  for  liberty;  and  to  Treitschke  Byron's 
greatest  verses  are  these: 


THE  ANCESTORS  OF  TREITSCHKE      87 

"Yet,  Freedom!  yet,  thy  banner  torn  but  flying, 
Streams,  like  the  thunderstorm,  against  the  wind; 
Thy  trumpet  voice,  tho'  broken  now  and  dying, 
The  loudest  still  the  tempest  leaves  behind. " 

IV 

LET  me  now  sketch  rapidly  the  life  and  career  of 
this  astonishing  man. 

Like  many  notable  Germans  of  the  nineteenth 
century,  above  all  that  German  who  is  now  begin- 
ning to  arrest  the  attention  even  of  Englishmen — 
for  as  a  rule  it  takes  at  least  half  a  century  for  any 
true  German  thought  to  cross  the  North  Sea! — 
like  Friedrich  Nietzsche,  and  perhaps  like  Ranke 
himself,  Heinrich  von  Treitschke  was  Slavonic 
in  origin.  His  ancestors  were  Czechs  who  mi- 
grated from  Bohemia  during  the  turmoils  of  the 
Thirty  Years'  War  and,  seeking  refuge  from  the 
Jesuit  plague,  found  security  under  the  Protestant 
Electors  of  Saxony.  During  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury they  gradually  rose  in  the  favour  of  the  ruling 
House.  Under  the  last  Elector  of  Saxony  a 
Treitschke  became  a  Privy  Councillor.  He  sent 
his  sons  into  the  army,  secured  for  them  in  1821 
the  syllable  von,  and  before  his  death  had  the 
pride  or  the  vanity  of  seeing  one  of  them  command- 
ant of  the  fortress  of  Konigstein,  which  still  rises 
in  grey  and  impressive  solitude  on  its  tall  rock 
above  the  Elbe.  This  was  Eduard  von  Treitschke, 
the  historian's  father. 


88    TREITSCHKE  AND  YOUNG  GERMANY 

Treitschke  was  born  at  Dresden  in  September, 
1834,  one  of  the  darkest  and  most  disconsolate 
periods  in  modern  German  history.  The  old  ideals 
were  sinking;  the  new  had  not  yet  arisen.  The 
despotism  of  Metternich  lay  like  a  dead  hand  upon 
Austria  and  the  South;  the  princes  clung  to  their 
privileges;  Frederick  William  III  still  reigned  in 
Prussia.  Schelling  died  that  year,  sunk  in  obscur- 
antism; Arndt  was  a  professor  at  Bonn;  Tieck 
had  ceased  to  write;  Wilhelm  von  Humboldt  still 
lived  in  honourable  retirement  at  Schloss  Tegel; 
but  Goethe  had  died  two  years  before,  and,  a 
year  earlier  than  Goethe,  Hegel  and  Niebuhr  had 
both  passed  away;  Stein  had  died  some  months 
after  Niebuhr  in  solitude  and  estrangement  from 
his  times,  seeing  not  only  Germany  but  Europe  itself 
rushing  upon  the  abyss.  Schleiermacher  preached 
for  the  last  time  in  1834.  The  heroes  of  the  War 
of  Liberation  were  long  dead,  or  lived,  an  embar- 
rassment and  a  reproach,  amid  a  generation  which, 
apathetic  and  indifferent,  half  wished  to  forget 
their  heroism.  Scharnhorst  had  died  of  his 
wounds  at  Prague  (1813),  in  the  very  hour  of 
Germany's  glory;  Blucher,  in  1819;  Yorck  in 
1830;  and  Gneisenau  (just  when  entering  upon  the 
Polish  campaign),  a  Field-Marshal  at  last,  had 
died  in  1831,  like  Hegel,  of  cholera,  then  raging 
throughout  Europe.  Who  was  there  left  to  repre- 
sent the  past  splendours?  And  in  the  deep  night 
there  was  not  a  star  to  hint  the  coming  dawn. 


HIS  CHILDHOOD  89 

Such  was  the  world  into  which  Treitschke  was 
born.1 

In  his  childhood  everything  seemed  to  mark  him 
out  as  a  Saxon,  as  destined,  that  is  to  say,  to  follow 
a  career  in  that  country.  Treitschke,  however, 
early  discovered  something  that  alienated  him 
from  the  career  contemplated  for  him  by  his 
father.  His  mother,  who  was  of  pure  German 
origin,  was  a  reader  of  Willibald  Alexis,  above  all 
of  those  tales  the  scenes  of  which  were  placed  in 
the  heroic  times  of  Frederick  the  Great ;  and  when 
Treitschke's  own  tastes  began  to  form  they  led  him 
as  instinctively  to  the  Wars  of  Liberation  as 
Rousseau's  tastes  had  led  him  to  Plutarch,  or 
Mirabeau's  to  Livy  or  the  Rome  of  the  Gracchi 
and  of  Sulla.  He  took  to  the  study  of  history; 
and  he  discovered  in  that  study  the  conduct  of 
Saxony  in  the  past,  the  conduct  of  the  Saxon 
dynasty — perhaps  the  stupidest  royal  House  in 
Europe.  He  discovered  the  part  played  by  Saxony 
at  Leipzig,  and  the  yet  more  despicable  part  played 
at  Waterloo;  and  all  that  was  German  as  distinct 
from  all  that  was  particularist  in  that  history  took 
possession  of  his  imagination. 

While  he  was  still  a  boy  his  great  heroes  were  not 
the  heroes  of  Saxony;  they  were  all  Prussians. 
Just  as  in  the  eighteenth  century  the  men  of  the 
French  Revolution  found  their  inspiration  in  the 

1  Treitschke  himself  has  described  this  period  in  the  third 
volume  of  his  "  Deutsche  Geschichte." 


90    TREITSCHKE  AND  YOUNG  GERMANY 

heroes  of  Plutarch,  Caius  Marius  and  Sulla  and 
Brutus,  so  Treitschke  found  his  inspiration  in  the 
Prussian  heroes  &  la  Plutarch,  in  those  magnificent 
figures  which  fill  and  adorn  the  pages  of  Prussian 
history  between  1809  and  1813.  His  heroes  are 
Gneisenau,  Blucher's  aide-de-camp,  he  who  really 
controlled  Blucher's  actions  in  all  matters  of 
diplomacy;  and  Scharnhorst,  of  whom  he  has  left 
one  of  the  most  powerful  sketches  that  German 
literature  possesses.  Again,  his  hero  is  Stein,  or 
the  philosopher  Fichte,  or  Moritz  Arndt  the  poet, 
the  son  of  a  serf,  author  of  the  famous  song, 
' '  Was  ist  des  Deutschen  Vaterland  ? ' '  And  there  is 
significance  as  well  as  authenticity  in  the  anecdote 
which  depicts  him  as  a  boy  of  fifteen  reading  aloud 
in  the  presence  of  Beust,  one  of  Metternich's  most 
repulsive  satellites,  an  essay  in  the  dithyrambic 
manner  rejoicing  in  the  downfall  of  the  princes 
and  exalting  German  unity,  a  unity  which  is  to  be 
accomplished  "by  a  race  into  whose  blood  has 
passed  in  their  youth  the  free  and  bracing  winds  of 
the  Baltic  strand." 

It  is  while  he  is  a  boy  also  that  there  overtakes 
him  a  disaster  which  tries  the  steel  and  stoicism 
in  him.  He  has  described  it  for  us  in  a  volume  of 
verses  published  in  1856 — the  coming  upon  him  of 
a  fever,  his  slow  recovery,  and,  at  last,  his  astonish- 
ment at  the  persistent  sorrow  on  his  mother's  face, 
despite  his  recovery.  He  describes  his  being  taken 
out  into  the  garden  on  an  early  summer's  day, 


DEAF  91 

lying  on  a  bench  in  the  sun,  seeing  the  bright  skies 
for  the  first  time  after  what  seemed  months  and 
years.  And  then  a  strange  thing  happens.  A 
singular  feeling  comes  over  him  of  a  vast  and 
unnatural  silence.  He  sees  the  mounting  lark ;  he 
hears  no  song.  It  is  a  silent  universe.  Terrified, 
the  child  rushes  back  into  the  house,  and  there  he 
discovers  the  cause  of  the  persistent  sorrow  on  his 
mother's  face.  He  is  nearly  stone  deaf,  incurably 
and  for  ever. 

His  description  of  the  fight  within  himself  back 
to  courage,  stoicism,  and  acceptance  of  life  is  a 
very  remarkable  passage  in  the  poem;  and  in  this 
passage  something  of  Treitschke's  temperament 
throughout  life  is  revealed.  "There  are  men  who 
are  doomed  to  pass  their  lives  on  broken  wings,"  he 
wrote  later  of  Heinrich  von  Kleist,  "because  some 
malevolent  chance  has  excluded  them  from  that 
sphere  in  which  alone  they  could  accomplish  the 
highest  that  is  in  them  to  do."  To  him  in  his 
youth  that  "highest"  seemed  his  missed  career  of 
action  and  war.  For  it  is  certain  that  Treitschke, 
compelled  to  be  a  writer  of  books,  would,  but  for 
this  disaster,  have  been  a  soldier. 

His  course  of  study  was  the  usual  course  of  a 
young  German  of  the  time.  Perhaps  the  greatest 
moment  in  it  was  when  he  came  to  the  University 
of  Bonn  in  1851.  There,  amid  the  romance  of  the 
scenery,  the  mountains,  the  distant  view  of  the 
spires  of  Koln — Balthazar,  Caspar,  and  Melchior, 


92     TREITSCHKE  AND  YOUNG  GERMANY 

the  Three  Kings — the  river,  the  castle  from  which 
Roland  had  started,  he  knew  the  happiest  period 
of  a  university  life.  "He  who  is  not  a  poet  in 
Heidelberg  or  Bonn,"  he  writes,  "is  dead  to 
poetry."  The  intellectual  activities  of  the  place 
rapidly  absorbed  him.  The  aged  poet,  Moritz 
Arndt,  was  still  teaching  history;  and  one  can 
imagine  the  thrill — indeed  he  himself  has  helped 
us  to  imagine  it — with  which  the  young  Treitschke, 
with  his  enthusiasm  for  the  heroes  of  the  War  of 
Liberation,  first  looked  upon  those  high  and  noble 
features.  Each  successive  phase  of  that  heroic 
action  Arndt  had  witnessed;  his  own  songs  had 
been  part  of  the  action ;  he  had  been  the  compan- 
ion and  confidant  of  the  great  minister  von  Stein. 
Even  more  powerful  was  the  influence  of  another 
of  the  Bonn  professors — Friedrich  Christoph  Dahl- 
mann,  the  historian  of  Denmark.  He  too,  like 
Arndt,  had  played  his  part  in  the  War  of  Libera- 
tion, and  at  four-and-twenty  he  had  walked  across 
Germany  with  the  poet  of  Arminius,  determined  to 
fight  in  the  ranks  of  Austria,  since  Prussia  was  still 
too  timid  or  too  weak  to  strike  at  the  tyrant.  In 
the  young  student  Arndt  kindled  memories  and 
sentiments ;  but  Dahlmann  was  at  once  an  inspira- 
tion as  a  lecturer  and  in  private  a  friendly  adviser. 
Next  perhaps  to  the  influence  of  Arndt  and 
Dahlmann  upon  him  was  the  influence  of  the  Rhine. 
It  is  hard  for  us  in  England  to  understand  what  the 
Rhine  really  means  to  a  German,  the  enthusiasm 


INFLUENCE  OF  THE  RHINE  93 

which  he  feels  for  that  river.  Treitschke  himself 
says  of  it,  for  instance,  when  he  has  to  leave  Bonn : 
"To-morrow  I  shall  see  the  Rhine  for  the  last 
time.  The  memory  of  that  noble  river  " — and  this 
is  not  in  a  poem,  observe,  but  simply  in  a  letter  to 
a  friend — "the  memory  of  that  noble  river  will 
keep  my  heart  pure  and  save  me  from  sad  or  evil 
thoughts  throughout  all  the  days  of  my  life. " 
Try  to  imagine  anyone  saying  that  of  the  Thames ! 

When  Treitschke  becomes  a  teacher  himself  and 
a  professor  at  Freiburg  these  are  the  influences 
governing  his  teaching.  His  own  career  as  a 
teacher  began  at  Leipzig  in  1859,  and  he  inaugu- 
rated it  in  a  striking  enough  manner  by  his  treatise 
on  "The  State. "  This  treatise  might  be  described 
as  an  abstract  justification  of  monarchy,  just  as 
Rousseau's  famous  Essay  might  with  fairness  be 
described  as  an  abstract  justification  of  democracy. 
Like  every  sincere  attempt  in  the  field  of  abstract 
politics  it  is  full  of  inconsistencies  and  contradic- 
tions; but  it  reveals  the  central  tendencies  of 
the  author's  mind.  The  friend  of  Bismarck,  the 
apologist  of  the  Hohenzollern  and  the  eager 
admirer  of  Prussian  bureaucracy  already  an- 
nounces himself.  The  essence  of  the  State,  he 
argues,  is  power;  but  it  is  a  moral  power,  and  in 
virtue  of  this  moral  nature  the  authority  of  the 
State  over  the  individual  is  supreme  and  without 
appeal. 

Four  years  later,  at  Freiburg,  he  gave  for  the 


94    TREITSCHKE  AND  YOUNG  GERMANY 

first  time  the  lectures  which  developed  afterwards 
into  the  two  volumes  entitled  "  Die  Politik. "  But 
the  stress  of  the  period  speedily  tears  Treitschke 
from  abstract  speculation  upon  the  State  to  living 
politics  and  to  the  study  of  the  actions  of  men  in 
the  concrete.  Bismarck's  struggle  with  the  Prus- 
sian parliament  is  at  its  height.  The  safety  and 
prestige  of  the  Prussian  monarchy  is  not  yet 
assured.  The  dispute  about  the  Duchies  is  at 
hand,  and  behind  it  rises  the  war  of  1864,  and 
behind  the  war  of  1864  and  the  Convention  of 
Gastein  loom  the  war  of  1866,  and  Koniggratz,  and 
the  creation  of  the  North-German  Confederation; 
then  the  insulting  half-maniacal  jealousy  of 
France,  and  the  war  of  1870. 

It  is  a  new  Germany,  almost  a  new  Europe. 
Since  the  rise  of  the  Spanish  monarchy  under 
Ferdinand  and  Isabella  and  its  liberation  from  the 
Saracen  dominion,  and,  at  about  the  same  period, 
the  rise  of  the  French  monarchy  under  Louis  XI 
and  his  successors,  no  event  has  so  revolutionized 
the  European  State-system. 

Treitschke  had  originally  been  destined  for  the 
army,  and  it  is  as  a  soldier  of  soldiers  that  we  see 
him  in  each  phase  of  those  momentous  nine  years. 
"Lay  on  my  coffin  a  sword,"  the  dying  Heine 
wrote  in  1856.  But  the  war  in  which  Treitschke 
fought  was  less  vague  than  that  dim  war  for  the 
freedom  of  humanity  in  which  Heine  imagined 
himself  a  fighter.  Treitschke  was  an  enthusiast 


THE   MAN  95 

for  freedom,  as  his  essays  on  Milton  and  Byron  as 
well  as  scores  of  passages  in  his  other  writings 
attest;  but  he  plunged  into  the  struggle  to  assert 
the  Prussian  ascendency  over  Germany  with  all 
the  ardour  with  which,  in  an  earlier  age,  Fichte 
and  Dahlmann  had  plunged  into  the  War  of 
Liberation.  At  Freiburg,  Kiel,  and  finally  at 
Heidelberg,  his  own  enthusiasm  communicated 
itself  to  hundreds  of  students  who  heard  him,  and 
ultimately  to  thousands. 

His  appearance  at  this  period  was  striking:  a 
tall,  rather  slim  figure,  marked  nobility  of  feature 
and  bearing,  dark  eyes  and  masses  of  thick  dark 
hair.  He  was  sparing  in  gesture,  abrupt  and 
effective,  more  chary  of  pure  rhetoric  than  Droy- 
sen,  more  regardful  of  fact  than  Hausser.  His 
voice  was  harsh,  the  Saxon  accent  unmistakable, 
and  he  had  often  to  pause  for  a  word.  He  seldom 
mixed  with  his  audience  after  his  lectures;  his 
deafness  made  this  difficult,  for,  to  a  man  of  his 
sensitiveness,  an  ear-trumpet  in  general  company 
was  abhorrent.  But  this  was  no  real  drawback; 
it  rather  invested  the  speaker  and  his  impassioned 
utterances  with  a  touch  of  prophetic  remoteness. 

"Is  Treitschke  an  orator  at  all?"  an  English 
admirer  of  his  writings  once  asked  a  member  of 
the  Reichstag.  "In  the  sense  in  which  Mr. 
Gladstone  was  an  orator,"  was  the  reply,  "cer- 
tainly not.  In  the  Reichstag  he  is  always  listened 
to  with  respect ;  he  never  kindles  enthusiasm ;  and 


96    TREITSCHKE  AND  YOUNG  GERMANY 

yet,  if  the  art  of  the  rhetor  is  to  compel  men  to 
action,  how  many  greater  orators  are  there  in 
modern  Germany,  or,  for  that  matter,  in  modern 
France  or  England,  than  simply  Heinrich  von 
Treitschke?  When  I  first  heard  him  many  years 
ago  I  had  been  reading  Palacky's  History  of 
Bohemia.  You  know  the  book?  Well,  in  the 
thick  of  Ziska's  tremendous  duel  I  constantly  saw 
young  Treitschke — for  at  that  time  he  was  not 
more  than  thirty — pass  between  me  and  the  page 
like  a  Hussite  warrior,  authentic,  irresistible,  a 
spiritual  fatalist,  like  Racine's  Joad  girding  on  his 
sword  in  the  name  of  the  Lord  of  Hosts.  And  see, 
yonder  he  comes." 

The  excitement,  the  momentary  pallor  on  the 
speaker's  face,  proved  to  the  Englishman  more 
powerfully  than  words  the  dominion  which  intel- 
lect united  to  moral  greatness  exercises  over  other 
men.  He  pointed  to  a  solitary  figure  walking  with 
a  stick  slowly  down  the  shady  path  of  the  splendid 
street  Unter  den  Linden.  He  walked  as  the  deaf 
always  walk,  glancing  rapidly  from  side  to  side. 
It  was  impossible  to  resist  the  melancholy  if 
penetrating  strength  in  the  dark  and  luminous 
eyes,  eyes  of  a  type  which  one  seldom  meets  in 
England,  full  of  meditative  depth  and  integrity, 
trust-winning.  Once,  where  the  crowd  was  less, 
he  raised  a  soft  grey  felt  wide-awake  hat,  for  the 
day  was  hot,  and  the  noble  forehead  was  for 
a  second  visible.  Involuntarily  the  Englishman 


THE   CENTRAL  THEME  97 

raised  his  own  hat  with  an  instinct  of  reverence. 
That  was  in  the  summer  of  I892.1 

The  years  in  which  Treitschke  wrote  his  great- 
est book  are  also  the  years  of  his  greatest  fame  as 
a  lecturer.  Probably  no  German  professor,  not 
Fichte,  not  Schlosser,  not  Droysen,  has  ever 
commanded  such  audiences.  His  lecture-hall  in 
Berlin  did  actually  suggest  a  concourse  such 
as,  in  the  Middle  Age,  met  to  hear  an  Abelard, 
or,  in  the  Renaissance  time,  thronged  around 
Giordano  Bruno  or  Pico  della  Mirandola. 

And  it  was  a  true  message,  a  "gospel,"  which 
they  came  to  hear,  a  gospel  which  the  commonest 
could  understand,  which  the  most  cultured  could 
not  disdain.  His  subject,  of  course,  was  History, 
or  it  was  Politics;  but  through  all  the  mazes  of 
historical  narrative,  carefully  documented,  fact  on 
fact  torn  from  hours  in  the  Berlin  archives,  and 
amid  all  the  mazes  of  political  speculation,  close 
and  stern  reasoning,  sometimes  repellent  by  its 
accumulation  of  apparently  redundant  matter 
and  irrelevant  illustration — amid  all  this  a  man's 
soul  was  wrestling  almost  visibly  to  bring  home  to 
his  hearers  his  own  burning  conviction  of  the  great- 
ness of  Germany,  her  past,  her  present,  and  the 

1  Treitschke's  influence  in  the  Reichstag  was  much  greater  than 
that  of  men  like  Lecky  or  Jebb  or  other  university  members  in  the 
British  Parliament.  It  was  more  akin  perhaps  to  that  of  John 
Stuart  Mill  when  he  was  returned  for  Westminster,  or  to  that  of 
Macaulay. 


98    TREITSCHKE  AND  YOUNG  GERMANY 

unfathomable  vistas  which  open  out  before  her  in 
the  future. 

That  is  Treitschke's  central  theme.  It  is  the 
informing  thought  of  each  of  his  distinctive  books 
or  collections  of  writings — the  five  volumes  of  his 
History,  the  two  volumes  of  his  "  Politik,"  his 
two  series  of  "  Deutsche  Kampfe,  his  "  Bilder  aus 
der  deutschen  Geschichte,"  his  political  essays 
and  literary  portraits,  above  all,  his  magnificent 
full-length  portraits  of  Dahlmann  and  of  the  poet 
Heinrich  von  Kleist. 


TREITSCHKE  has  no  philosophy  of  History  in  the 
sense  in  which  Hegel  or  Buckle  or  Cousin  has  a 
philosophy  of  History.  He  has  come  too  late  into 
the  world  for  that.  But  in  a  wider  sense,  like 
every  true  German  historian,  he  has  a  philosophy 
of  History.  There  is  nothing  in  which  German 
historians  more  completely  differ  from  English 
historians  than  in  this  respect.  No  German 
historian  is  ever  satisfied  that  he  has  the  right  to 
teach  history  until  he  has  acquired  for  himself 
by  individual  vision,  or  adopted  from  another, 
whether  Kant  or  Hegel  or  Lotze  or  Nietzsche, 
some  general  view,  some  theory  of  the  working  of 
God  in  History.  To  him  History  is  a  drama  in 
which  God  is  the  supreme  actor.  And  Treitschke 
has  such  a  vision  or  theory. 


GOD  IN  HISTORY  99 

What,  then,  did  that  audience,  consisting  of 
princes  and  officials,  of  soldiers  and  diplomats 
and  sometimes  the  most  prominent  figures  in  the 
Berlin  fashionable  world,  come  together  to  hear? 
They  came,  indeed,  to  hear  of  the  greatness  of 
Germany  in  other  years  and  in  other  centuries. 
They  saw  pass  before  them  in  rapid  sketches  the 
grandiose  or  tragic  forms  of  the  Suabian  and  the 
Saxon  dynasties.  They  were  made  to  thrill  with 
patriotic  pride  or  admiration  when,  in  speaking  of 
a  yet  later  age,  the  orator  described  in  mordant 
words  of  contempt  or  denunciation  the  desperate 
conflict  of  France,  Spain,  England  and  Holland  for 
exterior  wealth  and  power,  seeking  a  dominion 
upon  which  the  sun  shall  never  set,  whilst,  solitary, 
deep-thinking,  Germany  is  sunk  in  moral  and 
religious  absorption,  pursuing  the  freedom  of  the 
spirit,  poring  over  the  abyss  of  absolute  ideality, 
founding  a  spiritual  empire.  Or  the  gates  of  Sans 
Souci  were  flung  open  and  it  was  the  great  privi- 
lege of  Treitschke's  hearers  to  behold  its  builder 
painted  with  a  Velasquez-like  realism  and  a  Velas- 
quez-like sympathy,  with  profound  imaginative  in- 
sight and  vision.  But  before  all  and  above  all  that 
audience  came  together  to  hear  the  story  of  the 
manner  in  which  God  or  the  world-spirit,  through 
shifting  and  devious  paths,  had  led  Germany  and 
the  Germans  to  their  present  exalted  station  under 
Prussia  and  the  Hohenzollern,  those  great  princes 
who  in  German  worth  and  German  uprightness — 


ioo  TREITSCHKE  AND  YOUNG  GERMANY 

Aufrichtigkeit — are  unexampled  in  the  dynasties  of 
Europe  or  of  the  world.  Treitschke  showed  them 
German  unity,  and  therefore  German  freedom, 
lying  like  the  fragments  of  a  broken  sword,  a  magic 
sword  like  that  of  Roland,  or  of  Sigurd,  or  the 
Grey-Steel  of  the  Sagas;  and  these  fragments 
Prussia  alone  could  weld  again  into  dazzling 
wholeness  and  might. 

This  is  Treitschke's  governing  idea — the  great- 
ness of  Prussia,  the  glory  of  an  army  which  is  a 
nation  and  of  a  nation  which  is  an  army.1 

A  great  Greek  historian,  Dion  Cassius,  writing 
of  the  Roman  Empire — a  Greek  historian,  observe, 
writing  of  the  Roman  Empire — said  that  his 
conception  and  vision  of  the  supreme  end  of 
humanity  was  the  whole  world  governed  by  the 
divinely-appointed  State  of  Rome.  Similarly  I 
should  say  that  this  conception  of  the  German 
Fatherland,  the  whole  German  kindred,  governed 
by  Prussia  and  by  the  House  of  Hohenzollern  is 


1  To  Giesebrecht  also  Germany  is  the  nation  of  nations,  the 
people  of  peoples.  Droysen  is  even  more  explicit.  At  the  period 
of  the  Schleswig-Holstein  war  he  declared  that  to  the  Hohen- 
zollern belonged  the  throne  left  empty  or  occupied  by  usurpers 
since  the  death  of  Konradin.  His  "History  of  Prussian  Policy," 
based  on  lectures  at  Jena,  is  governed  by  a  similar  idea.  The 
last  volume  appeared  posthumously  in  1886.  It  is  a  pamphlet, 
and  false  as  a  pamphlet.  It  is  impossible  to  read  without  a  smile 
the  portraiture  of  the  early  Electors  of  Brandenburg  as  "creators 
of  the  German  idea,  following,  as  mariners  a  lodestar,  the  con- 
ception of  German  unity. " 


A  UNITED  GERMANY  101 

the  underlying  theme  of  the  Saxon  Treitschke 
addressing  a  Prussian  audience.  And  just  as  it 
had  been  necessary  that  Rome  should  first  conquer 
the  world  in  order  to  rule  it  in  justice,  so  it  had 
been  necessary  that  Prussia  should  dominate 
Germany  in  order  to  give  to  Germany  present 
unity  and  future  grandeur. 

When  Treitschke  turns  from  Prussia,  when  he 
turns  from  the  War  of  Liberation  in  1813  and  casts 
his  glance  backwards  across  German  history,  that 
history  catches  fire  under  his  pen  from  the  power 
and  the  illumination  of  this  same  idea.  The 
whole  movement  of  Germany  from  Charlemagne, 
the  House  of  Hohenstaufen,  the  great  heroic  past 
of  the  Holy  Roman  Empire,  from  the  time  of  the 
Reformation  and  of  Frederick  the  Great  to  that  of 
Gneisenau  and  Stein,  is  towards  this  consum- 
mation— a  united  Germany  under  the  supremacy 
of  Prussia.  And  now  upon  what  a  career  of 
high-uplifted  glory  shall  not  that  mighty  nation 
start!  Once  united,  who  shall  set  bounds  to  this 
Germany?  What  dream  of  the  mediaeval  em- 
perors, what  dream  of  a  Frederick  II,  "the  Wonder 
of  the  World,"  of  a  Barbarossa,  of  an  Otto  I,  but 
shall  be  surpassed  by  this  Germany  that  he,  Hein- 
rich  von  Treitschke,  sees  arise  within  the  frontiers 
of  his  imagination,  scanning  the  future,  brooding 
on  things  to  come! 

And  Fate  was  strangely  kind  to  Treitschke. 
Though  dwelling  in  that  silent  universe  of  the 


102    TREITSCHKE  AND  YOUNG  GERMANY 

deaf,  and  threatened  in  age  with  the  darkened 
universe  of  the  blind,  he  lived  just  long  enough  to 
see  upon  the  silver  horizon  of  the  North  Sea,  and 
upon  the  more  mysterious  horizon  of  the  Future, 
the  first  promise  of  the  German  fleets  of  the 
future.  He  saw  Germany  thus  fitting  herself  for 
that  high  task  which  he  had  marked  out  to  one 
generation  after  another  of  students — the  day  of 
reckoning  with  England,  the  day  of  reckoning  with 
the  great  enemy  for  whom  he  had  nevertheless  that 
kind  of  regard  which  every  great  foe  inspires,  which 
England's  strength  inspires.  And  yet  his  imagi- 
nation pierced  beneath  the  semblance  of  her 
strength,  which  to  his  imagination  was  but  a 
semblance. 

VI 

WHAT  are  the  origins  of  this  antagonism  or  this 
antipathy  in  Treitschke  to  England  and  to  things 
English?  The  question  is  worth  asking;  for  there 
is  no  disputing  Treitschke's  immense  influence  not 
only  upon  his  own  generation  but  upon  the  whole 
of  modern  German  thought. 

This  attitude  of  mind  does  not  begin  with  him ; 
it  is  present  in  the  Heidelberg  School,  in  Hausser, 
for  instance,  and  in  Schlosser;  and  Dahlmann's 
"History  of  the  English  Revolution"  is  capable  of 
many  interpretations.  But  in  Treitschke  the 
antagonism  reaches  a  height  and  persistence  of 
rancour  or  contempt  which  in  so  great  a  man  is 


ORIGINS  OF  TREITSCHKE'S  ANTIPATHY  103 

arresting  if  not  unique.  To  him  the  greatness  of 
England  passes  with  the  seventeenth  century, 
with  Cromwell  and  Milton. 

The  origins  of  this  sentiment  are  partly  histor- 
ical, partly  moral,  and,  in  Treitschke,  must  be 
sought  in  his  character  as  a  man  and  as  a  patriot. 
Britain's  world-predominance  outrages  him  as  a 
man  almost  as  much  as  it  outrages  him  as  a  Ger- 
man. It  outrages  him  as  a  man  because  of  its 
immorality,  its  arrogance  and  its  pretentious 
security.  It  outrages  him  as  a  German  because  he 
attributes  England's  success  in  the  war  for  the 
world  to  Germany's  preoccupation  with  higher 
and  more  spiritual  ends.  But  for  her  absorption 
in  those  ends  and  the  civil  strife  in  which  that 
absorption  resulted,  Germany  might,  in  the  seven- 
teenth and  eighteenth  centuries,  have  made  the 
Danube  a  German  river  and  established  a  German 
predominance  from  the  Bosphorus  to  the  Indus. 

The  sentiment  has  also  its  roots  in  history, 
recent  and  remote.  "France,"  said  Bismarck  in 
September,  1870,  "must  be  paralyzed;  for  she  will 
never  forgive  us  our  victories. "  And  in  the  same 
spirit  Treitschke  avers :  England  will  never  forgive 
us  our  strength.  And  not  without  justice  he 
delineates  English  policy  throughout  the  eigh- 
teenth and  nineteenth  centuries  as  aimed  con- 
sistently at  the  repression  of  Prussia,  so  soon  as 
English  politicians  discovered  the  true  nature  of 
that  State  and  divined  the  great  future  reserved  for 


104  TREITSCHKE  AND  YOUNG  GERMANY 

it  by  destiny.  Had  not  England  been  Prussia's 
treacherous  but  timid  enemy  in  1864  and  1866,  and 
again  in  1870-71,  and,  above  all,  in  1874-75? 

But  the  strongest  motive  is  the  conviction, 
which  becomes  more  intense  as  the  years  advance, 
that  Britain's  world-predominance  is  out  of  all 
proportion  to  Britain's  real  strength  and  to  her 
worth  or  value,  whether  that  worth  be  considered 
in  the  political,  the  social,  the  intellectual,  or  the 
moral  sphere.  It  is  the  detestation  of  a  sham. 
"In  this  universe  of  ours  the  thing  that  is 
wholly  a  sham — wholly  rotten — may  endure  for  a 
time,  but  cannot  endure  for  ever."  This  is  the 
protest  of  the  stern  apostle  of  reality.  He  fre- 
quently rings  the  changes  on  the  "nation  of  shop- 
keepers," pointing  with  aptness  and  justice  to  the 
general  meanness  and  gradually  increasing  sordid- 
ness  of  English  political  life.  That  which  Treitsch- 
ke  hates  in  England  is  what  Napoleon  hated 
in  England — a  pretentiousness,  an  overweening 
middle-class  self-satisfaction,  which  is  not  really 
patriotism,  not  the  high  and  serious  passion  of 
Germany  in  1813  and  1870,  but  an  insular  narrow 
conceit;  in  fact,  the  emotion  enshrined  in  that  most 
vulgar  of  all  national  hymns,  "Rule  Britannia"! 

"The  nations  not  so  blest  as  thee 
Must  in  their  turn  to  tyrants  fall, 
Whilst  thou  shalt  flourish,  great  and  free 
The  dread  and  envy  of  them  all. " 


TREITSCHKE'S  ANTI-ENGLISHISM     105 

Consider  the  world-picture  which  that  upcalls !  A 
single  island  usurping  the  glory  of  freedom,  sur- 
rounded by  a  world  groaning  beneath  tyrants, 
whilst  she  sits  in  lonely  grandeur! 

For  Treitschke  it  is  not  genius,  it  is  not  valour, 
it  is  not  even  great  policy,  as  in  the  case  of  Venice, 
which  has  built  up  the  British  Empire;  but  the 
hazard  of  her  geographical  situation,  the  supine- 
ness  of  other  nations,  the  measureless  duplicity  of 
her  ministers,  and  the  natural  and  innate  hypocrisy 
of  the  nation  as  a  whole.  These  have  let  this 
monstrous  empire  grow — a  colossus  with  feet  of 
clay.  Along  with  this  he  has  the  conviction  that 
such  a  power  can  be  overthrown.  And  with  what 
a  stern  joy  and  self-congratulation  would  not  the 
nations  acclaim  the  destruction  of  the  island- 
State,  "Old  England,"  old,  indeed,  and  corrupt, 
rotten  through  and  through ! 

The  sincerity  as  well  as  the  intensity  of  Treitsch- 
ke's  anti-Englishism  is  attested  by  the  sponta- 
neity and  variety  with  which  it  finds  expression. 
The  indignation  of  Schlosser,  judging  his  con- 
temporaries as  Dante  judged  his  contemporaries, 
is  a  dispersed  indignation;  Treitschke's  is  concen- 
trated upon  England  only.  His  inventiveness  is 
astonishing.  Here  he  takes  up  a  phrase  of  Mon- 
tesquieu, who  in  "The  Spirit  of  Laws"  makes 
England,  so  to  speak,  the  hero  of  that  great  and 
perfect  book,  and  he  turns  Montesquieu's  judg- 
ment into  an  occasion  for  a  diatribe  not  only 


106  TREITSCHKE  AND  YOUNG  GERMANY 

against  French  character  in  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury, but  against  the  whole  character  of  English 
history.  At  another  time  he  attacks  the  private 
character  of  the  English  in  a  manner  that  recalls 
Nietzsche's  witty  apophthegm,  when,  speaking  of 
the  part  played  by  danger  and  suffering  in  the 
heroic  life,  he  observes,  "Man,  after  all,  does  not 
really  desire  happiness;  only  the  Englishman 
does  that,"  thus  adroitly  placing  the  Englishman 
outside  the  pale  of  humanity  altogether.  But 
Treitschke  is  seldom  witty,  though  often  grossly 
if  unintentionally  offensive.  He  is  as  unable 
as  Heine  to  see  anything  fine  in  the  English 
character. 

"Foreign  critics  do  not  like  my  books?  That  is 
natural.  I  write  for  Germans,  not  foreigners, "  he 
answered  with  impatient  contempt  when  an 
admirer  pointed  out  to  him  the  injury  he  did  to  his 
chances  of  a  European  success  like  that  of  Ranke 
or  Mommsen.  And  in  the  love  and  measureless 
admiration  of  his  own  nation  he  has  had  his 
reward. 

One  final  question.  When,  by  the  light  of  what 
is  called  "impartial  history,"1  one  considers  the 
events  of  the  last  century  in  their  bearing  on 
Treitschke's  theory  of  Germany's  future,  whither 
does  Germany  in  that  century,  at  once  in  politics 

1  Of  course  there  is  no  such  thing  as  "impartial  history,"  and 
even  if  there  could  be  impartial  history  it  would  be  the  dullest, 
stupidest  thing  on  this  earth  of  ours. 


GERMAN  CONTRASTS  107 

and  in  thought,  really  seem  to  be  moving?  In  the 
first  place,  if  we  contrast  the  Germany  of  the 
present  day  with  the  old  half-idyllic,  half-despotic 
Germany  of  Goethe's  great  youth  and  early  fame, l 
of  Lessing's  manhood,  of  Schiller's  early  years,  of 
Herder  and  the  Jacobis — that  Germany,  almost 
patriarchal  in  its  simplicity,  quite  clearly  has 
passed  away  for  ever.  Its  exclusive  ideal  was 
culture,  not  patriotism,  and  the  first  word  in  cul- 
ture always  is  Mankind,  Humanitas,  Humanity. 
It  was  essentially,  that  is  to  say,  a  cosmopolitan 
Germany.  Goethe,  for  instance,  when  his  whole 
nation,  convulsed  by  the  war  against  Napoleon,  is 
looking  to  him  for  guidance — how  does  the  great 
poet  of  Germany  act?  He  turns  aside  altogether 
from  the  present  and  resolutely  fixes  his  imagi- 
nation upon  Persia!  Upon  Persian  poetry,  the 
Persian  Divans,  the  beauties  of  Jallal'ud'din,  of 
Hafiz,  of  Sa'di!  And  in  regard  to  Napoleon  he 
said  to  a  German  friend,  "That  fellow  is  far  too 
strong  for  you;  you'll  never  do  anything  against 
him."  But  men  can  now  no  longer  say  with 
Jacobi,  "I  hear  on  every  side  nowadays  the  word 
'German,'  but  who  is  a  German?  I  strive  in  vain 
as  yet  to  attach  any  precise  meaning  to  the  term"; 
or  with  Lessing  himself  that  patriotism  is  nothing 
but  an  heroic  weakness  that  he  for  one  is  glad  to  be 

1  That  is  to  say,  the  period  in  which  he  writes  "Werther," 
the  First  Part  of  "Wilhelm  Meister,"  and  the  First  Part  of 
41  Faust, "  and  those  great  dramas  "  Iphigenie  "  and  "  Tasso. " 


108  TREITSCHKE  AND  YOUNG  GERMANY 

rid  of;  or  with  Herder,  "Of  all  kinds  of  pride  I  hold 
national  pride  the  most  foolish;  it  ruined  Greece; 
it  ruined  Judaea  and  Rome."  Gone,  too,  are  the 
days  of  Karl  Immermann,  who  could  never  follow 
a  political  debate  because  he  could  form  no  image 
of  such  abstractions. x 

There  you  have  that  earlier,  and,  if  you  choose 
to  call  it  so,  that  greater  Germany.  But  what 
Treitschke  sees  underneath  that  is  the  Germany  of 
the  War  of  Liberation,  Prussia  renascent,  and  her 
steady  advance  throughout  the  nineteenth  century 
to  the  present  day.  And  as  Treitschke,  casting  his 
eyes  back  to  primitive  German  history,  sees  arise 
there  the  religion  of  the  valiant,  the  religion  of 
Valour,  so  now,  with  this  informing  thought  in  the 
mind,  we  can  trace  in  the  Germany  of  1913  like  a 
dawn  upon  the  horizon,  piercing  like  a  sun  through 
all  the  transient  mists  of  industrialism,  socialism, 
militarism,  the  vision  of  that  same  religion  return- 
ing to  Germany — that  Religion  of  Valour. 

1  That  was  the  Germany  very  largely  of  Hegel;  it  certainly  was 
the  Germany  of  Kant.  And  to  him  also,  I  daresay,  though  we 
have  no  record  of  it,  it  would  have  been  difficult  to  associate, 
there  at  Konigsberg,  any  particular  meaning  with  the  words 
"German  patriotism." 


LECTURE  IV 

PAST  AND  FUTURE 


IN  speaking  the  concluding  words  on  a  great  sub- 
ject the  endeavour  to  choose  from  among  the  mul- 
titude of  ideas  which  throng  in  upon  the  mind 
discourages  the  imagination,  oppressing  it  with  a 
sense  of  the  inadequacy,  if  not  the  uselessness,  of 
any  effort  to  pierce  the  future  or  to  trace  its  prob- 
able course  in  the  history  of  two  nations.  How  is 
it  possible  to  discover  any  principle  which  will 
enable  us  to  conjecture,  even  in  outline,  the  future 
of  two  such  empires  as  Germany  and  England? 

I  remember  that  narrative  in  Ordericus  of  the 
death-bed  of  one  of  our  greatest  kings,  one  of  the 
most  heroic  and  tragic  figures  of  modern  history. 
Dying,  he  augured  of  the  future;  he  saw  disaster 
descending  upon  his  own  work  and  upon  this  na- 
tion; he  augured  of  the  conduct  and  careers  of 
individuals.  The  irony  in  a  Greek  tragedy,  in 
which  Destiny  seems  to  take  a  clear  joy  in  making 
sport  of  the  anticipations  and  desires  of  men,  is 
not  more  scornful  than  the  irony  with  which  Des- 
tiny turned  to  nothingness  the  auguries  of  the 

109 


I  io  PAST  AND  FUTURE 

dying  Norman,  alike  in  regard  to  individuals  and 
to  nations. 

The  temptation  therefore  is  to  be  silent,  to  avoid 
any  prophecy  whatever,  to  say  bluntly  and  at 
once,  "The  future  is  impenetrable,"  or  again,  "It 
is  inevitable  as  the  past" — equally  inevitable 
whether  we  regard  the  bloody  strivings  of  this 
universe  as  blind  chance  or  as  the  eternal  unwind- 
ing and  winding  of  a  predetermined  or  arbitrary 
scheme. 

Yet  History  itself  becomes  mere  picturesque 
anecdote  as  in  Macaulay,  or  an  unending  series  of 
brilliant  biographies  as  in  Carlyle,  or  a  staid  recon- 
struction of  Council  or  Parliamentary  procedure  as 
in  Hallam  and  Stubbs,  unless,  after  a  long  sojourn 
in  the  past  and  a  steady  gaze  into  the  future  out  of 
the  past,  the  present  becomes,  as  it  were,  trans- 
parent and  the  forms  of  the  future,  dim  and  colos- 
sal like  clouds  or  the  dark  procession  of  trees 
reflected  in  water,  become  obscurely  visible. 
Unless  the  study  of  the  past  of  two  such  nations  as 
Germany  and  England,  nations  which  some  fifteen 
hundred  years  ago  lived  side  by  side  within  their 
native  woods,  enables  one  to  form  some  percep- 
tion, to  attain  to  some  Ahnung,  as  a  German  would 
say,  of  the  inward  fate  which  shapes  the  destiny  of 
nations,  History  itself  in  any  true  sense  becomes 
impossible. 

In  support  of  this  principle  I  may  point  out  that 
between  the  lives  of  nations  and  of  individual  men 


DESTINY  OF  NATIONS  AND  MEN     in 

there  is,  after  all,  another  distinction  than  that  of 
longevity.  The  final  test  is  not  arithmetic;  for 
whilst  he  who  ventures  to  vaticinate  on  the  career 
of  an  individual,  to  generalize  upon  its  future 
course  from  temperament  or  from  strength  of 
purpose,  may  in  an  instant  be  derided  by  some  of 
the  myriad  forms  which  "Chance"  assumes — a 
sudden  illness,  a  street  accident,  some  untoward 
occurrence  from  the  past,  the  action  of  a  friend  or 
enemy — he  who  deals  with  the  careers  of  nations 
and  peoples  is  secure  from  such  misadventures. 
In  the  life  of  a  nation  "accident,"  or  "Chance," 
the  dread  mistress  of  accident,  plays  a  part  so 
slight  that  it  can  all  but  be  ignored.  It  is  this, 
therefore,  which  subordinates  the  history  of  na- 
tions to  law  and  to  cause  and  effect  rather  than, 
as  in  the  individual  life,  to  accident.  The  power 
of  cause  and  effect,  however  commonly  it  may  be 
talked  of,  is,  in  the  individual  life,  a  minimum. 
Many  years  ago  Schopenhauer  pointed  out  the 
force  of  this  contrast.  War,  indeed,  seems  to  ex- 
pose a  nation  to  fortune ;  yet  Russia  is  already  re- 
covering from  the  campaign  in  Manchuria,  Mukden 
is  forgotten,  and  Russia  has  resumed  her  resistless 
path,  slow  as  the  movement  of  a  glacier  but  as 
sure. 

And  there  is  another  respect  in  which  the  des- 
tiny of  nations  differs  from  the  destiny  of  men. 
In  the  conscious  action  of  individuals  motive  or 
purpose  is  supreme;  but  the  forces  which  govern 


112  PAST   AND   FUTURE 

the  action  of  States  approximate  more  closely  to 
the  operation  of  causes  in  the  natural  world. 
They  can  more  readily  be  grouped  under  laws. 
A  science  of  politics  thus  becomes  possible;  a 
philosophy  of  history  a  pursuit.  Religion  is  the 
very  essence  of  both;  history  becomes  religion, 
religion  history;  for  ultimately  the  supreme  Actor 
in  history  and  in  politics  is  God.  Time's  drama, 
world  rising  behind  world,  universe  behind  uni- 
verse, is  His  drama;  its  theatre  this  far-outspanned 
fabric  of  star-drift  and  suns,  of  fire-cloud  and  sunk 
system  blackening  in  ether;  and  here,  on  this 
planet,  great  nations,  cities  and  empires  are  the 
brief  embodiments  or  the  transient  realizations  of 
His  desires.  Thus  the  nearer  man's  portraiture  of 
God  approaches  to  reality  the  nearer  will  his  philo- 
sophy of  history  approach  to  a  complete  harmony 
between  semblance  and  substance,  that  is,  towards 
Truth.  For  History,  the  course  of  events,  is  not 
the  light,  but,  as  its  name,  loropfa  implies,  a 
continuous  searching  for  the  light — the  world- 
spirit  down  the  ages  seeking  the  realization  of  its 
ultimate  desire,  a  tragic  realization  because  it  can 
only  end  in  the  destruction  of  the  world-soul's 
Being  as  such. 

Regarding  this  universe  and  man's  history,  then, 
as  a  movement  towards  a  fixed  end  and  a  tragic 
end,  how  shall  one  determine  the  sphere  or  define 
the  operation  of  cause  and  of  law  in  the  history  of 
nations?  For  just  as  from  the  motion  of  a  planet 


THE  TREND  OF  NATIONS  113 

it  is  possible  to  gauge  something  of  its  future 
course,  so  from  the  history  of  nations  it  is  possible 
to  gauge  their  course  because  of  this  approximation 
in  them  to  cause  and  effect.  But,  again,  if  this 
cause  and  effect  is  really  to  be  estimated,  measured, 
the  utmost  care  must  be  taken  that  it  is  the  true 
cause  and  the  true  effect  that  is  examined.  No- 
thing is  more  common  in  modern  times  than  to 
speak  of  cause  and  effect,  especially  in  regard  to 
history;  yet  in  man's  history  nothing  is  more 
difficult  than  to  attain  to  something  like  a  just 
conception  of  a  true  cause.  Roughly  speaking,  I 
should  define  any  cause  to  which  an  historical 
event  is  ascribed  as  a  true  cause  when  it  can  be 
submitted  to  the  categories  of  universality  and 
necessity.  It  must  be  possible  to  give  a  true 
cause  the  form  of  a  law,  and  that  law  must  be 
universal  in  its  application;  that  is  to  say,  its 
operation  must  be  the  same  in  other  circumstances 
and  even  in  other  worlds,  and  its  operation  must 
be  inevitable. 

Let  me  select  an  example  from  the  history  of 
Germany,  an  example,  indeed,  from  the  history  of 
the  Teutonic  race  itself. 

In  studying  so  complex  and  varied  a  movement 
as  the  Reformation,  if  we  contented  ourselves,  as 
used  to  be  the  practice,  with  assigning  the  cause  of 
that  movement  to  Luther's  happening  to  find  a 
Latin  Bible  at  Erfurt,  and  if  we  then  proceeded  to 
test  that  cause  by  the  criterion  of  universality  and 


ii4  PAST   AND   FUTURE 

necessity,  we  should  require  to  affirm  that  when- 
ever and  in  whatever  circumstances  an  individual 
man  discovers  the  original  text  of  a  religion,  such 
a  movement  as  the  Reformation  must  inevitably 
follow.  The  vice  in  this  argument  is  self-evident. 
We  are  compelled  to  look  elsewhere  for  the  cause 
of  the  Reformation  than  in  the  career  of  Luther; 
and  still  less  can  we  seek  it  in  a  single  incident  of 
that  career,  whether  his  discovery  of  the  Vulgate 
or  his  study  of  the  writings  of  St.  Paul. 

If,  on  the  other  hand,  we  affirm  that  to  any  race 
'or  nation,  dowered  with  creative  genius  in  reli- 
gion, which  shall,  at  an  early  period  of  its  career, 
adopt  the  religion  of  a  more  civilized  race,  a  time 
must  come  when  the  former  race  shall  examine  the 
truth  of  that  religion  and  by  the  mere  force  of  its 
own  nature  press  on  towards  another,  higher 
truth;  and  if  we  submit  the  Reformation  to  the 
operation  of  this  law  and  study  it  as  a  movement 
which,  declaring  itself  as  early  as  the  thirteenth 
century,  gradually  reaches  its  climax  in  the  six- 
teenth, and  passes  into  a  new  phase  and  a  new 
purpose  in  the  eighteenth,  then  we  have  arrived 
at  what  may  be  described  as  a  vera  causa,  a  true 
cause,  a  cause,  that  is  to  say,  which  we  can  imagine 
as  operative  in  all  times  and  places,  amongst  all 
nations  and  even  in  other  spheres  of  being  than 
ours. 

It  would  be  easy  to  illustrate  this  still  further 
by  the  contrast  between  the  alleged  and  the  real 


DISCOVERY  OF  CAUSES  115 

causes,  say,  of  the  French  Revolution,  or  the 
Hundred  Years'  War  against  France,  or  the  fall 
of  Rome  or  of  Venice.  Only  a  year  ago,  in  speak- 
ing of  the  causes  of  the  French  Revolution,  I 
pointed  out  how  superficial  is  that  view  of  the 
French  Revolution  which  attributes  it  only  to  the 
writings  of  Voltaire  and  of  Rousseau.  How  com- 
mon is  that  explanation!  Yet  if  you  universalize 
this  seeming  cause  of  the  French  Revolution  that 
too  evaporates. 

But  if  true  causes  in  history  are  difficult  to  dis- 
cover, it  does  not  follow  that  they  are  undiscover- 
able,  or  that,  in  our  effort  to  attain  to  a  perception 
of  the  deep  underlying  forces  in  the  inward  fate 
and  destiny  of  nations,  some  true  cause  may  not 
disclose  itself  and  make  the  gauging,  the  measuring, 
the  computing  with  regard  to  the  future,  something 
more  than  mere  conjecture;  and  it  is  this  which 
renders  it  possible  to  deal  with  our  subject  here 
to-day. 

II 

IN  the  present  and  future  relations  of  England 
and  Germany  is  it,  then,  possible  out  of  the  past 
to  discover  the  operation  of  such  forces  or  causes 
as  will  enable  us  to  conjecture  the  future  r61es 
of  these  two  nations? 

First  of  all,  it  is  evident  that  the  region  in  which 
one  must  seek  them  is  the  region  in  which  Eng- 
land's needs  come  most  sharply  into  conflict  with 


ii6  PAST  AND   FUTURE 

Germany's  desires.  And  here  a  law,  obvious, 
universal  and  inevitable  in  its  application,  dis- 
closes itself.  It  concerns  the  struggle  for  power. 
Amongst  free  independent  nations  weakness  means 
war;  and  the  empire  which  is  not  prepared  to 
defend  itself  by  forces  proportionate  to  the  mag- 
nitude of  that  empire  must  fall. 

The  period  at  which  an  empire  becomes  sta- 
tionary can  never  be  more  than  approximately 
determined.  Thus  in  the  history  of  Rome  it  may 
be  assigned  to  the  sixty  years  between  the  acces- 
sion of  Hadrian  and  the  death  of  Marcus  Aurelius ; 
and  in  that  of  Venice  to  the  fifty  years  between 
the  dogeship  of  Antonio  Grimani  and  that  of 
Luigi  Mocenigo.  But  in  each  case  that  period 
also  announces  the  beginning  of  the  decline;  for 
here  again  nations  are  subject  to  the  operations  of 
natural  law,  and  it  may  be  affirmed  that  the 
empire  which  has  ceased  to  advance  has  begun  to 
recede  and  therefore  to  decline,  and  the  empire 
which  has  begun  to  decline  is  dead  already. 

There  comes,  for  instance,  a  moment  in  the 
history  of  Rome  when  the  question  of  putting  an 
end  to  Rome's  attempt  to  govern  the  whole  world 
is  repeatedly  before  Roman  thinkers  and  politi- 
cians. And  from  the  first  century  of  the  Roman 
era  men  recalled  a  strange  circumstance.  When 
the  city  was  founded  the  assembled  gods  each 
gave  to  Rome  some  beneficence,  some  great  faculty 
peculiar  to  himself;  but  Terminus,  the  god  of 


IS  THERE  A  LIMIT?  117 

Boundaries,  of  Limitations,  on  that  memorable 
day  refused  his  gift,  defying  even  the  master  of 
the  gods,  Jupiter  himself.  And  the  Roman  au- 
gurers  took  this  as  a  symbol  that  in  the  future 
there  should  be  no  boundaries  set  to  Rome's 
dominion,  that  there  never  would  come  a  time 
when  she  should  abandon  her  world-mission.  In 
the  reign  of  Hadrian,  however,  there  came  at  last 
a  moment  when  a  term  was  set  to  Rome's  advance, 
when,  from  jealousy  of  his  predecessor  Trajan, 
Hadrian  gave  back  the  former's  Eastern  conquests 
and  withdrew  within  the  earlier  limits  of  the 
empire.  And  the  wits  of  Rome  then  said  that 
the  god  Terminus,  who  had  defied  Jupiter,  had 
yielded  most  courteously  to  the  Emperor  Hadrian ! 

Has  such  a  moment  come  for  England?  Is 
there  any  reason  why  we  should  now  tolerate  the 
courtesy  of  the  god  Terminus?  Is  there  a  limit 
to  our  expansion?  Until  the  last  decade  of  the 
nineteenth  century  the  history  of  Imperial  Britain 
is  one  of  rapid  and  easy  advance,  in  the  Mediter- 
ranean, in  the  Atlantic,  in  the  Southern  Seas, 
amongst  the  Pacific  Isles.  Did  she  reach  in  that 
decade  that  stage  when  an  empire,  ceasing  to 
advance,  has  begun  to  recede  and  therefore  to 
decline?  And  was  the  Boer  War  a  proof  at  once 
of  her  weakness  and  her  strength?  This  is  the 
real  problem  of  imperialism  in  1913. 

In  contrast  to  this,  what  of  Germany?  I  have 
described  the  attitude  of  the  youth  of  Germany, 


ii8  PAST  AND   FUTURE 

soldiers,  students,  professors,  politicians,  writers 
of  books.  Their  position  is  clear.  "Are  we  to 
acquiesce,"  they  ask,  "in  England's  possession  of 
one-fifth  of  the  globe,  with  no  title-deeds,  no  claim, 
except  priority  in  robbery?  Our  greatest  teachers 
so  describe  it."  And  I  showed  you  how  young 
Germans  of  the  twentieth  century  can,  in  support 
of  this  position,  appeal  to  the  representations  of 
English  history  by  many  of  the  most  commanding 
intellects  of  their  own  nation,  expressed  in  guarded 
or  unguarded  terms.  They  can  even  cite  the 
Englishman  Seeley  as  a  witness  to  the  dominion 
which  hazard  has  played  in  England's  uncouth 
and  unmerited  grandeur.  She  is  the  Malvolio  of 
nations;  greatness  has  been  thrust  upon  her. 

And  then  follows  the  fixed  and  inevitable  con- 
clusion, now  silent  but  deeply  and  passionately 
resentful,  now  clamorous  and  aggressive,  as  in 
the  Prussian  war-party  and  its  adherents  in  every 
rank  of  Prussian  life:  "Is  all  indeed  lost;  and  is  the 
war  for  the  world  ended?  In  the  world-arena  has 
Germany,  like  a  belated  champion,  girt  in  her 
shining  armour,  ridden  up  to  the  great  tourney 
too  late?  Has  Destiny,  like  a  herald,  by  a  trum- 
pet's sound  proclaimed  the  lists  closed?  Must  the 
splintered  sword  which  Germany  has  at  last  suc- 
ceeded in  welding  into  a  solid  blade  so  dazzling 
and  terrific — must  it  indeed  rest  in  its  sheath  for 
ever?  Can  the  youth  of  Germany  acquiesce  in 
this  cowardly  renunciation  and  not  forfeit  honour 


DOMINION   OR   DEATH  119 

and,  with  honour,  manhood?"  Hence  the  real 
force  and  the  real  meaning  of  Bernhardi's  iterated 
watchword:  "Empire  or  Downfall — Weltmacht 
oder  Niedergang"  It  is  as  if  he  said:  "World- 
dominion  or  Death." 

Such  then  is  the  situation  and  such  are  the 
problems  which  in  the  immediate  future  confront 
all  that  is  young,  all  that  is  ardent  throughout 
Germany,  in  those  teeming  cities  and  towns,  those 
universities  and  gymnasia.  Every  decade,  every 
half  decade  leaves  the  question  more  poignant. 
With  every  advance  in  her  conscious  strength 
which  the  Germany  of  Wilhelm  II  makes  on  land 
or  in  the  air  or  on  the  sea  the  necessity  of  an  answer 
will  become  more  imperious,  the  terms  of  the 
problem  more  strict  and  confined,  and,  other 
things  remaining  the  same,  the  resultant  rancour 
of  mind  more  feverish.  x 

1  Other  contingencies  than  war  with  England  are  possible  in 
the  immediate  future.  A  war  with  France,  as  a  military  critic 
insists,  may  break  out  at  any  moment,  and,  assuming  that  Eng- 
land stands  cynically  aloof,  that  war,  if  France  is  permitted  to 
work  out  her  three-years  system,  may  end  in  a  drawn  game, 
though  by  its  savage  fury  leaving  both  nations  so  weak  from 
haemorrhage  that  a  quarter  of  a  century  will  be  necessary  for 
either  to  recover  its  prestige.  On  the  other  hand,  Germany  may 
decide  not  to  await  the  development  of  the  three-years  system 
in  France,  and,  trusting  to  diplomats  and  to  her  present  enormous 
superiority  in  numbers,  may  strike  France  without  a  declaration 
of  war  and  overwhelm  her  by  sheer  weight. 

This  is  Bernhardi's  interpretation  of  Germany's  duty,  for  it 
would  leave  Germany  front  to  front  with  England.  France 


120  PAST   AND   FUTURE 

III 

Now  let  me  examine  the  subject  more  from  the 
standpoint  of  history  than  that  of  politics.  Burke 
long  since  deprecated  the  drawing  up  of  an  indict- 
ment against  a  whole  nation,  and  Sir  Thomas 
Browne  in  a  famous  passage  has  stigmatized  "the 
sin  against  charity"  involved  in  all  such  indict- 
ments. It  is  scarcely  less  hazardous  or  less  diffi- 
cult to  characterize  with  sureness  the  temper  or 
the  mood  of  a  people  in  this  or  that  period  of  its 
history.  And  yet  when  such  familiarity  as  leisure 
affords  and  unbiased  inquiry,  anxious  only  to  see 
the  thing  as  in  very  deed  it  is1  and  as  in  very  deed 
it  has  arisen,  leave  a  definite  impression  on  the 
mind,  it  can  hardly  be  a  "sin  against  charity" 


humiliated,  the  incorporation,  on  advantageous  terms,  of  Holland 
with  the  German  Empire  would  be  easy.  The  submission  or 
annexation  of  Belgium  would  follow  of  itself. 

With  regard  to  the  enmity  between  Russia  and  Germany,  in 
Germany's  antagonism  to  Russia  there  is  nothing  fateful,  nothing 
organic.  It  is  a  wound  that,  as  Bismarck  once  very  profoundly 
said,  can  be  cauterized  at  any  moment,  because  there  is  not  and 
never  has  been  any  innate  cause  for  war  between  Germany  and 
Russia.  Germany  does  not  seek  Constantinople;  her  patronage 
of  Turkey  was  the  natural  reply  to  the  unnatural  alliance  of 
France  and  Russia.  But  the  enmity  of  England  and  Germany 
is  like  one  of  those  springs  that  rise  from  the  nether  deep;  the 
more  you  try  to  fill  them  up  the  wider  they  become. 

1  To  me  the  most  disquieting  thing  in  our  relations  to  Germany 
is  our  politicians'  fixed  resolution  to  see  things  other  than  as 
they  are. 


GERMANY'S   HERO-IDEAL  121 

or  render  me  subject  to  the  accusation  of  rashness 
if  I  state  that  impression. 

Already  the  minds  which  determine  the  action 
of  nations,  touched  with  the  lure  of  world-domin- 
ion, compare  the  resolution  and  emotion  which 
this  vision  of  Germany's  future  stirs  in  its  devo- 
tees to  the  emotion  and  great  resolve  of  Faust, 
when,  conquering  his  past  and  freed  from  his  re- 
morses, he  wakens  amid  the  glittering  solitudes 
of  the  Alps,  sees  the  sun  above  the  summits,  sees 
the  rainbow  span  the  cataract,  and  speaks  the 
noble  verses: 

"  Du,  Erde,  wanst  auch  diese  Nacht  bestandig 
Und  atmest  neu  erquickt  zu  meinen  Fiissen, 
Beginnest  schon  mit  Lust  mich  zu  umgeben. 
Du  regst  und  riihrst  ein  kraftiges  Beschliessen, 
Zum  hochsten  Dasein  immerfort  zu  streben.  "x 

But  what,  it  may  be  asked,  is  that  highest  being, 
that  highest  ideal?  It  is  world-dominion;  it  is 
world-empire;  it  is  the  hegemony  of  a  planet.  It 
assigns  to  Germany  in  the  future  a  r61e  like  that 
which  Rome  or  Hellas  or  Judaea  or  Islam  have 
played  in  the  past.  That  is  Germany's  hero- 
ideal.  It  is  at  least  greatly  conceived. 

1  "Thou,  Earth,  this  night  wast  also  constant  found, 
And  breathest,  newly  quickened,  at  my  feet, 
Already  with  delight  encircling  me. 
Thou  wak'st  and  stir'st  in  me  a  strong  resolve — 
Towards  highest  being  onwards  still  to  strive." 


122  PAST   AND   FUTURE 

Assuming  for  a  moment  that  this  world-predomi- 
nance is  possible  to  Germany,  what  is  the  testi- 
mony of  Germany's  past  to  her  capacity  to  play 
this  r61e?  You  find  Germany  an  empire  already 
in  the  seventh  century,  if  you  regard  Charlemagne 
as  a  German— as  he  was;  and  again  you  have 
attempts  at  imperialism  made  by  the  German 
race  under  the  Ottos  in  the  tenth  century;  but 
most  distinctly  is  Germany  an  imperial  power 
in  the  twelfth  century,  in  the  time  of  the  Hohen- 
staufen,  one  of  the  most  tragic  dynasties  in  history. 
She  then  has  Italy  as  her  appanage;  and  her 
record  there,  under  Frederick  I,  Henry  VI,  and 
Frederick  II,  is  the  record  in  Ireland  of  England 
at  her  worst. 

Again,  the  history  of  Germany  as  an  imperial 
power  in  the  seventeenth  and  eighteenth  centuries 
centres  in  the  records  of  the  Habsburgs  in  Italy; 
and  it  is  impossible  not  to  observe  that  the  presence 
of  the  Habsburgs,  of  the  Germans,  as  an  imperial 
power  in  Italy,  is  synchronous  with  the  defeat 
and  obliteration  of  Italian  art,  Italian  literature, 
Italian  religion,  and  Italian  patriotism.  And  in 
the  nineteenth  century  Germany's  power  in  Italy 
centres  in  the  name  of  Metternich,  that  minister 
who  stands  in  the  annals  of  European  history  as 
the  synonym  of  reaction  and  oppression,  the  man 
who  employed  the  dungeon  and  the  fortress  as  the 
chief  instruments  of  an  enlightened  government! 

Here,  then,  is  the  augury  that  the  past  affords 


GERMAN  IMPERIALISM  123 

as  to  the  future  of  Germany  as  a  world-civilizing 
power.  Here  we  have  the  record  of  the  past — I 
stress  the  word. 

But,  it  is  argued,  this  is  not  the  true  Germany. 
Those  attempts  under  the  Ottos  in  the  tenth 
century,  and  in  the  twelfth  and  thirteenth  under 
the  great  House  of  Hohenstaufen,  are  attempts  at 
empire  indeed,  but  the  German  nation  as  such 
takes  no  part  in  them.  German  imperialism  in 
that  period  is,  as  it  were,  forced  upon  it  from 
without.  The  nation  is  indifferent  to  empire. 
The  true  impulse  of  the  people  is  to  be  found  in 
the  Free  Cities,  for  instance  in  the  Hansa  League. 
And  the  passing  away  of  those  early  efforts  is 
succeeded  by  a  period  of  purely  dynastic  efforts 
at  empire  in  Germany,  in  which  the  nation  becomes 
divorced  entirely  from  the  action  of  the  governing 
House,  the  House  of  Habsburg.  So  that,  until 
the  present  time,  until,  as  Treitschke  admirably 
points  out,  the  Hohenzollern  became  the  para- 
mount power  in  Germany,  there  has  been  no 
national  attempt  at  empire  at  all.  The  true 
German  genius,  Treitschke  himself  affirms,  only 
finds  its  expression  under  the  domination  of 
Prussia  and  of  the  Hohenzollern.  The  beginnings 
of  German  imperialism,  that  is  to  say,  are  to  be 
found  only  in  the  Germany  of  the  last  hundred 
years  under  that  glorious  House! 

Germany's  past  as  a  world-civilizing  power  does 
not  concern  the  German  thinkers  of  to-day. 


124  PAST  AND  FUTURE 

"We  give  the  past,"  they  say,  "to  England. 
When  we  speak  of  empire  the  empire  we  mean  is 
in  the  future.  You  have  drunk  the  wine  of 
empire.  It  is  Germany's  turn  now.  And  it  is 
vain  to  look  back  to  the  Hohenstaufen  and  to  the 
Habsburgs  in  Italy.  Just  as  it  would  be  vain  to 
appeal  to  England's  conduct  in  Ireland  in  the 
fourteenth  and  fifteenth  centuries  for  the  augury 
of  England's  conduct  as  an  empire  in  India  under 
Cornwallis  and  Wellesley,  Dalhousie  and  Canning, 
so  it  is  vain  to  appeal  to  the  past  of  Germany  in 
Italy  for  any  augury  of  the  character  of  the  empire 
that  shall  arise  in  the  future  out  of  Germany." 

Treitschke  has  defined  the  aim  of  Germany, 
and  Treitschke's  definition,  which  has  been  taken 
up  by  his  disciples,  is  this:  That  just  as  the  great- 
ness of  Germany  is  to  be  found  in  the  governance 
of  Germany  by  Prussia,  so  the  greatness  and  good 
of  the  world  is  to  be  found  in  the  predominance 
there  of  German  culture,  of  the  German  mind — 
in  a  word,  of  the  German  character.  This  is  the 
ideal  of  Germany,  and  this  is  Germany's  r61e  as 
Treitschke  saw  it  in  the  future. 

For,  observe,  this  world-dominion  of  which 
Germany  dreams  is  not  simply  a  material  do- 
minion. Germany  is  not  blind  to  the  lessons 
inculcated  by  the  Napoleonic  tyranny.  Force 
alone,  violence  or  brute  strength,  by  its  mere 
silent  presence  or  by  its  loud  manifestation  in 
war,  may  be  necessary  to  establish  this  dominion; 


ESTABLISHMENT  OF  A  WORLD-EMPIRE  125 

but  its  ends  are  spiritual.  The  triumph  of  the 
Empire  will  be  the  triumph  of  German  culture, 
of  the  German  world- vision  in  all  the  phases  and 
departments  of  human  life  and  energy,  in  religion, 
poetry,  science,  art,  politics,  and  social  endeavour. 
The  characteristics  of  this  German  world- vision, 
the  benefits  which  its  predominance  is  likely  to 
confer  upon  mankind,  are,  a  German  would  allege, 
truth  instead  of  falsehood  in  the  deepest  and 
gravest  preoccupations  of  the  human  mind;  Ger- 
man sincerity  instead  of  British  hypocrisy;  Faust 
instead  of  Tartuffe.  And  whenever  I  have  put 
to  any  of  the  adherents  of  this  ideal  the  further 
question:  "Where  in  actual  German  history  do 
you  find  your  guarantee  for  the  character  of  this 
spiritual  empire;  is  not  the  true  r61e  of  Germany 
cosmopolitan  and  peaceful;  are  not  Herder  and 
Goethe  its  prophets?"  I  have  met  with  one 
invariable  answer:  "The  political  history  of 
Germany,  from  the  accession  of  Frederick  in  1740 
to  the  present  hour,  has  admittedly  no  meaning 
unless  it  be  regarded  as  a  movement  towards  the 
establishment  of  a  world-empire,  with  the  war 
against  England  as  the  necessary  preliminary. 
Similarly  the  curve  which,  during  the  last  century 
and  a  half,  Germany  has  traced  in  religion  and 
metaphysical  thought,  from  Kant  and  Hegel  to 
Schopenhauer,  Strauss,  and  Nietzsche,  has  not 
less  visibly  been  a  movement  towards  a  newer 
world-religion,  a  newer  world-faith.  That  fatal 


126  PAST  AND   FUTURE 

tendency  to  cosmopolitanism,  to  a  dream-world, 
which  Heine  derided1  and  Treitschke  deplores, 
does,  indeed,  still  remain,  but  how  transfigured!" 
But  what  definitely  is  to  be  Germany's  part  in 
the  future  of  human  thought?  Germany  answers: 
"It  is  reserved  for  us  to  resume  in  thought  that 
creative  r61e  in  religion  which  the  whole  Teutonic 
race  abandoned  fourteen  centuries  ago.  Judaea 
and  Galilee  cast  their  dreary  spell  over  Greece  and 
Rome  when  Greece  and  Rome  were  already  sinking 
into  decrepitude  and  the  creative  power  in  them 
was  exhausted,  when  weariness  and  bitterness 
wakened  with  their  greatest  spirits  at  day  and 
sank  to  sleep  again  with  them  at  night.  But 
Judaea  and  Galilee  struck  Germany  in  the  splen- 
dour and  heroism  of  her  prime.  Germany  and 
the  whole  Teutonic  people  in  the  fifth  century 
made  the  great  error.  They  conquered  Rome, 
but,  dazzled  by  Rome's  authority,  they  adopted 
the  religion  and  the  culture  of  the  vanquished. 
Germany's  own  deep  religious  instinct,  her  native 
genius  for  religion,  manifested  in  her  creative 
success,2  was  arrested,  stunted,  thwarted.  But, 

x"Sohn  der  Thorheit!  traume  immer, 
Wenn  dirs  Herz  im  Busen  schwillt; 
Doch  im  Leben  suche  nimmer 
Deines  Traumes  Ebenbild!" 

(Werke,  Elster's  ed.,  vol.  ii.,  p.  159.) 

3  Gothic  architecture,  the  abbeys  and  cathedrals  from  Burgos 
to  Chartres  and  Koln,  are  the  living  witnesses  to  the  Teuton's 
imagination  in  the  new  religion. 


GERMANY'S  PART  IN  HUMAN  THOUGHT  127 

having  once  adopted  the  new  faith,  she  strove  to 
live  that  faith,  and  for  more  than  thirty  generations 
she  has  struggled  and  wrestled  to  see  with  eyes 
that  were  not  her  eyes,  to  worship  a  God  that  was 
not  her  God,  to  live  with  a  world-vision  that  was 
not  her  vision,  and  to  strive  for  a  heaven  that 
was  not  her  heaven.  And  with  what  chivalry  and 
with  what  loyalty  did  not  Germany  strive!  With 
what  ardour  she  flung  herself  first  into  the  pursuit 
of  sainthood  as  an  ideal  and  then  into  the  Crusades ! 
Conrad  and  Barbarossa,  Otto  the  Great  and 
Frederick  II,  Hildebrand  and  Innocent  III,  were 
of  her  blood,  so  were  Godfrey  and  Tancred  and 
Bohemund.  Yet  in  the  East,  in  the  very  height 
of  her  enthusiasm,  the  outward  fabric  of  faith 
sank.  In  the  East  where  she  sought  the  grave  of 
Christ  she  saw  beyond  it  the  grave  of  Balder,  and 
higher  than  the  New  Jerusalem  the  shining  walls 
of  Asgard  and  of  Valhalla.  In  Jerusalem,  stand- 
ing beside  an  empty  grave,  the  summits  of  a 
mightier  vision  gleamed  spectral  around  her. 
And  whilst  her  Crusaders,  front  to  front  with 
Islam,  burst  into  passionate  denials  and  set 
Mohammed  above  Christ,  or  in  exasperated  scorn 
derided  all  religion,  her  great  thinkers  and  mystics 
led  her  steadily  toward  the  serener  heights  where 
knowledge  and  faith  dissolve  in  vision,  and  ardour 
is  all. 

"A  great  hope  had  sunk;  a  mightier  hope  had 
arisen.     But,    like   the   purposes   of   the   world- 


128  PAST   AND   FUTURE 

spirit  in  everlasting  self -disaccord,  this  hope  could 
only  be  born  in  the  bloodiest  strife,  and  agony 
infinite,  and  fertilizing  hatred  and  war.  This  is 
the  true  import  of  that  long  conflict  which  begins 
with  the  Schmalkaldic  League  and  only  ends  on 
the  battlefields  of  Tilly  and  Wallenstein,  Gustavus 
Adolphus,  Bernhard  of  Saxe  Weimar  and  Torsten- 
sen.  Rome  no  longer  a  guide,  Germany  was  torn 
by  the  violence  of  furious  heresies,  from  which 
sprang  the  wild  secret  orgies  of  the  Black  Mass, 
and  that  subterranean  literature  of  which  the 
'  De  Tribus  Impostoribus '  is  a  sign. 

"The  seventeenth  century  flung  off  Rome;  the 
eighteenth  undermined  Galilee  itself;  Strauss 
completed  the  task  that  Eichhorn  began ;  and  with 
the  opening  of  the  twentieth  century,  Germany,  her 
long  travail  past,  is  re-united  to  her  pristine  genius, 
her  creative  power  in  religion  and  in  thought. 

"And  what  is  the  religion  which,  on  the  whole, 
may  be  characterized  as  the  religion  of  the  most 
earnest  and  passionate  minds  of  young  Germany? 
What  is  this  new  movement?  The  movement,  the 
governing  idea  of  the  centuries  from  the  four- 
teenth to  the  nineteenth,  is  the  wrestle  of  the 
German  intellect  not  only  against  Rome,  but 
against  Christianism  itself.  Must  Germany  sub- 
mit to  this  alien  creed  derived  from  an  alien 
clime?  Must  she  for  ever  confront  the  ages  the 
borrower  of  her  religion,  her  own  genius  for 
religion  numbed  and  paralyzed? 


THE   NEW   MOVEMENT  129 

"Hence  the  significance  of  Nietzsche.  Kant 
compromises,  timid  and  old;  Hegel  finds  the 
Absolute  Religion  in  Christianity;  Schopenhauer 
turns  to  the  East  and  at  thirty-one  adapts  the 
Upanishads  to  the  Western  mind ;  David  Friedrich 
Strauss,  whilst  denying  and  rejecting  the  meta- 
physic  of  Christianity,  clings  to  the  ethics.  But 
Nietzsche?  Nietzsche  clears  away  the  'accumu- 
lated rubbish '  of  twelve  hundred  years ;  he  attempts 
to  set  the  German  imagination  back  where  it 
was  with  Alaric  and  Theodoric,  fortified  by  the 
experience  of  twelve  centuries  to  confront  the 
darkness  unaided,  unappalled,  triumphant,  great 
and  free. 

"Thus,  while  preparing  to  found  a  world-empire, 
Germany  is  also  preparing  to  create  a  world- 
religion.  No  cultured  European  nation  since  the 
French  Revolution  has  made  any  experiment  in 
creative  religion.  The  experiment  which  England, 
with  her  dull  imagination,  has  recoiled  from, 
Germany  will  make;  the  fated  task  which  England 
has  declined,  she  will  essay." 

That  is  the  faith  of  young  Germany  in  1913. 
The  prevalent  bent  of  mind  at  the  universities, 
in  the  army  amongst  the  more  cultured,  is  towards 
what  may  be  described  as  the  religion  of  Valour, 
reinterpreted  by  Napoleon  and  by  Nietzsche— 
the  glory  of  action,  heroism,  the  doing  of  great 
things.  It  is  in  metaphysics  Zarathustra's  "Amor 
Fati."  It  is  in  politics  and  ethics  Napoleonism. 


130  PAST   AND-  FUTURE 

These  same  young  men,  who,  in  this  very  month, 
thrill  with  the  scenes  of  1813,  see  in  Napoleon 
the  oppressor,  but  they  see  in  Napoleon's  creed 
the  springs  of  his  action,  a  message  of  fire :  Live 
dangerously ! 

Kant's  great  Imperative  was  born  of  the  defeats 
and  of  the  victories  of  Frederick;  echoes  from 
Kolin  and  Kunersdorf,  as  well  as  from  Rossbach, 
thrid  along  its  majestic  phrasing;  it  is  moulded 
in  heroic  suffering  and  brought  forth  in  resignation 
and  in  grief  that  is  overcome.  But  in  the  newer 
Imperative  ring  the  accents  of  an  earlier,  greater 
prime,  the  accents  heard  by  the  Scamander,  which 
even  at  Chaeronea  did  not  entirely  die  away : 

"Ye  have  heard  how  in  old  times  it  was  said, 
Blessed  are  the  meek,  for  they  shall  inherit  the 
earth;  but  I  say  unto  you,  Blessed  are  the  valiant, 
for  they  shall  make  the  earth  their  throne.  And 
ye  have  heard  men  say,  Blessed  are  the  poor  in 
spirit;  but  I  say  unto  you,  Blessed  are  the  great 
in  soul  and  the  free  in  spirit,  for  they  shall  enter 
into  Valhalla.  And  ye  have  heard  men  say, 
Blessed  are  the  peacemakers;  but  I  say  unto  you, 
Blessed  are  the  war-makers,  for  they  shall  be 
called,  if  not  the  children  of  Jahve,  the  children 
of  Odin,  who  is  greater  than  Jahve." 

IV 

THE  influence  which  Napoleon  exercises  upon 
modern  German  thought  is  peculiar  and  instruc- 


INFLUENCE  OF  NAPOLEON  131 

tive.  In  Europe  as  a  whole,  in  the  twentieth  cen- 
tury, two  great  spirit-forces  contend  for  men's 
allegiance — Napoleon  and  Christ.  The  one,  the 
representative  of  life-renunciation,  places  the 
reconciliation  of  life's  discords  and  the  solution 
of  its  problems  in  a  tranquil  but  nebulous  region 
beyond  the  grave ;  the  other,  the  asserter  of  earth 
and  of  earth's  glories,  disregardful  of  any  life 
beyond  the  grave,  finds  life's  supreme  end  in 
heroism  and  the  doing  of  great  things,  and  seeks 
no  immortality  except  the  immortality  of  renown, 
and  even  of  that  he  is  slightly  contemptuous. 
To  Napoleon  the  end  of  life  is  power  and  the 
imposing  of  his  will  upon  the  wills  of  other  men. 
Like  Achilles  or  like  Ajax,  ever  to  be  the  first  and 
to  outshine  all  others  is  his  confessed  ambition. 
The  law,  on  the  other  hand,  which  Christ  laid 
upon  men  appears  to  be  the  law  of  self-effacement. 
The  true  Christist  toils  but  for  others;  he  prays 
but  for  others.  He  suffers  for  them;  he  dies  for 
them;  Servus  servorum  Dei — slave  of  the  slaves 
of  God — was  the  proud  subscription  which  the 
haughtiest  of  the  mediaeval  Pontiffs  placed  at  the 
end  of  their  letters. 

In  Europe,  I  say,  this  conflict  between  Christ 
and  Napoleon  for  the  mastery  over  the  minds  of 
men  is  the  most  significant  spiritual  phenomenon 
of  the  twentieth  century.  You  meet  with  it  in 
England  and  in  America,  as  in  Austria  and  Spain. 
You  meet  with  it  even  in  Italy.  In  Russia  Tolstoi's 


I32  PAST   AND   FUTURE 

furious  attacks  are  a  proof  of  its  increasing  sway. 
The  new  spirit  in  France  is  its  unacknowledged 
derivative.  But  it  is  in  Germany  alone  that  as 
yet  Napoleonism  has  acquired  something  of  the 
clearness  and  self-consistency  of  a  formulated 
creed,  above  all  in  Berlin  and  in  the  cities  and 
towns  that  come  most  within  the  influence  of 
Berlin.  They  have  not  forgotten  1806  and  the 
years  of  hideous  humiliation  which  followed;  they 
have  not  forgotten  the  German  conscripts  who 
were  compelled  to  fight  under  the  banners  of  their 
conqueror;  they  have  not  forgotten  the  297,000 
men  of  German  blood,  who  under  the  Corsican's 
leadership,  had,  in  1812,  to  march  against  Russia; 
nor  have  they  forgotten  1813  and  the  tremulous 
awful  hour  when  the  destinies  of  Europe  and,  so 
to  speak,  of  the  world,  hung  in  the  balance  at 
Dresden,  at  Kulm,  at  Katzbach  and  at  Leipzig. 
But,  whilst  abjuring  the  tyrant  of  Germany  and 
the  oppressor  of  Europe,  they  have  gradually 
acquired  a  profound  and  ever  profounder  rever- 
ence for  the  creed  and  the  religion  towards  which 
that  great  and  solitary  spirit,  perhaps  the  loneliest 
amongst  the  children  of  men,  still  struggled  amid 
the  tumults  and  desolations,  the  triumphs  and 
the  glories,  the  victory  and  the  disaster  of  his 
tragic  and  brief  career — a  world-tragedy,  his,  at 
once  the  Man  of  Destiny  and  the  Antagonist  of 
Destiny. 

More  than  the  Europe  of  1800  and  1801,  which 


CORSICA  HAS  CONQUERED  GALILEE     133 

saw  in  the  victor  of  Marengo  the  Mohammed  of  a 
new  era,  the  enunciator  of  a  new  faith,  young  Ger- 
many, the  Germany  of  to-day,  in  the  writings  of 
Treitschke  and  of  the  followers  of  Treitschke, 
studies  Napoleonism,  illumining  politics  with  an 
austere  and  uplifting  grandeur.  In  the  writings  of 
Nietzsche  and  of  the  followers  of  Nietzsche  they 
study  the  same  Napoleonism  transforming  the 
principles  of  everyday  life,  breathing  a  new 
spirit  into  ethics,  transfiguring  the  tedious,  half- 
hypocritical  morality  of  an  earlier  generation. 
Remorse  for  the  great  error  of  the  race  in  the  fifth 
century  has  ousted  every  other  admiration. 

Corsica,  in  a  word,  has  conquered  Galilee. 

And  the  future?  All  there  is  as  yet  obscure ;  but 
that  "empire  of  the  spirit"  will  certainly  be  some- 
thing of  wider  range,  of  indefinitely  wider  range 
than  the  whole  of  the  confederated  German  world, 
or  any  idealization  of  that  world,  however  up- 
lifted or  sublime.  One  mighty  issue  is  secured: 
Germany  at  least  shall  not  confront  the  twentieth 
century  and  its  thronging  vicissitudes  as  the 
worshipper  of  an  alien  God,  thrall  of  an  alien 
morality.  Dazzling  as  Elpore1  with  the  dawn-star 
above  her  brow,  the  New  Germany,  knit  once 
more  to  the  divine  genius  within  herself,  delivered 
from  the  loathed  burden  of  the  past,  the  cancer  of 
the  centuries,  confronts  the  vast  darkness. 

The  role  of  a  new  Judaea  or  a  new  Hellas  is  lofty 

*  See  Goethe's  "  Pandora." 


134  PAST  AND   FUTURE 

enough  to  stimulate  the  imagination  and  give  an 
inspiration  to  the  monotony  of  contemporary  life. 
But  this  changed  and  changing  Europe  of  ours, 
this  changed  and  changing  world,  does  it  definitely 
forbid  or  nobly  encourage  that  hope?  Do  the 
present  conditions  of  the  world  permit  of  a  new 
Judaea  or  a  new  Hellas? 

History,  I  have  somewhere  said,  never  really 
repeats  itself — except  in  the  leading  articles  of 
newspapers!  But  in  the  years  in  front,  ineffec- 
tively and  impotently  crowded  by  Nietzsche  with 
his  ambiguous  caricature,  the  Superman,  a  thing 
made  by  Nature's  journeyman — in  that  future 
what  newer  path  to  a  newer  world-vision,  what 
creative,  all-informing,  all-comprehensive  thought 
which  shall  extort  a  reluctant  homage  even  from 
the  East,  may  not  the  German  imagination,  its 
fetters  broken,  now  carve?  Till  now  all  has  been 
negative.  Chaos  has  returned;  but  out  of  that 
chaos  what  new  and  miraculous  cosmos  may  not 
the  German  imagination  raise? 

That  world-empire  of  which  Germany  dreams 
she  may,  or  may  not,  on  its  material  side,  attain; 
but  in  this  race  for  the  spirit's  dominion,  the 
mightier  empire  of  human  Thought,  who  is  her 
rival?  Where  even  is  her  competitor?  Not 
England  assuredly;  for  in  that  region  England  in 
the  twentieth  century  has  a  place  retrograde 
almost  as  Austria  or  Spain;  not  America;  not 
Russia;  not  Japan,  with  her  tasteless,  over-eager 


BRITISH  IMPERIALISM  135 

efforts   to  enter  the  comity  of  Europe.     Is  it 
France?  .  .  . 

***** 

[The  discussion  of  this  question  was  here  broken  off  as 
the  lecture  hour  was  nearing  its  end;  and  it  is  not 
possible  to  Jill  the  gap  from  any  notes  left  by  the 
lecturer.  The  "ambitions"  spoken  of  in  the  first 
sentence  of  Section  V  are  clearly  those  of  world- 
empire  "on  its  material  side. "] 


IF  these,  then,  are  the  legitimate  impulses,  the  just 
ambitions  of  Germany — and  what  Englishman 
remembering  the  methods  by  which  the  British 
Empire  has  been  established  in  India,  in  America, 
in  Africa,  in  Egypt,  dare  arraign  those  impulses  or 
those  ambitions? — if  these  are  the  modes  which  the 
"will  to  power"  assumes  in  modern  Germany, 
what  of  England  and  those  needs  of  England  with 
which  they  enter  most  immediately  into  collision? 

And  here  it  is  necessary,  as  a  preliminary,  to 
consider  the  purpose  of  British  Imperialism  at  the 
present  day  and  the  manner  in  which  that  purpose 
has  been  evolved;  to  consider  what  the  past  of 
England  and  of  this  empire  of  ours  has  been,  what 
has  been  the  ideal  shaped  in  that  past  and  what  it  is 
that  has  made  the  greatness  of  England. 

Now  assuredly  there  was  never  a  period  in  our 
history  when  it  was  more  essential  than  at  the  pres- 


I36  PAST   AND   FUTURE 

ent  that  every  Englishman  should  have  some  clear 
conception  of  what  the  words  "Empire"  and 
"Imperialism"  really  mean,  what  they  have 
meant  in  the  past.  Yet  there  has  never  been  a 
period  in  which  those  words  were  employed  more 
vaguely  or  more  variously;  and  vague  words  lead 
to  vague  actions.  England  in  the  twentieth 
century  has  reached  that  transition  stage  in  the 
history  of  all  empires  when  more  or  less  uncon- 
scious effort  passes  into  conscious  realization  and 
achievement.  We  are  passing,  that  is  to  say,  from 
the  period  when  we  created  this  empire  almost 
without  knowing  it,  to  a  period  in  which  all  the 
latent  purposes  of  our  history  have  emerged  into 
the  full  survey  of  everyday  criticism,  everyday  com- 
ment. This  consciousness  or  over-consciousness 
of  empire  is  a  new  phase  in  the  political  life  of 
England  and  is  of  momentous  significance.  The 
mind  of  the  race,  absorbed  no  longer  in  the  onward 
striving,  dwells  persistently,  at  times  morbidly,  on 
its  present  greatness,  or,  turning  backward,  re- 
interprets the  past  by  the  light  of  the  present,  and 
in  nearer  or  remoter  actions  and  eras  discovers 
purposes  which  were  unsuspected  alike  by  the 
heroes  of  those  actions  and  by  their  contempo- 
raries, but  which  led  inevitably  to  the  present. 

In  Roman  history  the  age  of  Augustus  offers  the 
most  exact  analogy  to  the  twentieth  century  in  the 
history  of  Imperial  Britain.  Montesquieu,  survey- 
ing the  work  of  the  early  kings  of  Rome,  clinches 


ENGLAND'S  POSITION  TO-DAY       137 

the  survey  in  the  fine  and  telling  phrase:  "They 
had  already  begun  to  build  the  eternal  city. "  But 
even  Livy,  writing  his  History  under  the  dominion 
of  a  single  thought,  is  too  much  of  an  historian, 
amid  all  his  rhetoric,  to  ascribe  to  any  Roman 
politician  or  to  any  Roman  orator  before  the  time 
of  Sulla  so  terse  and  conscious  an  interpretation  of 
Rome's  mission  as  that  which  Virgil  has  placed  in 
the  mouth  of  Anchises:  , 

"Excudent  alii  spirantia  mollius  aera, 
credo  equidem,  vivos  ducent  de  marmore  vultus, 
orabunt  causas  melius,  ccelique  meatus 
describent  radio  et  surgentia  sidera  dicent: 
tu  regere  imperio  populos,  Romane,  memento; 
has  tibi  erunt  artes;  pacisque  imponere  morem, 
parcere  subjectis  et  debellare  superbos."1 

There  are  other  points  of  resemblance.  Britain's 
concession  of  practical  autonomy  to  South  Africa, 
before  the  traces  of  war  had  vanished  from  farm 
and  veldt,  extorted  the  admiration  of  Europe;  but 
it  has  its  parallel  on  an  even  greater  scale  in  Caesar's 
grant  of  the  franchise  to  the  Gauls  and  in  his 
formation  of  the  Gaulic  legions. 

1 "  Others,  I  know  it  well,  the  breathing  bronze  shall  chase, 
And  from  the  death-cold  marble  upcall  the  living  face, 
Shall  plead  with  eloquence  not  thine,  shall  mete  and  map 

the  skies, 
And  with  the   voice    of    science  tell  when  stars   shall   set 

and  rise: 

Be  thine,  O  Rome,  to  rule;  nor  e'er  this  destiny  forgo, 
To  spare  who  yield  submission,  and  bring  the  haughty  low." 


138  PAST   AND   FUTURE 

Is  it  possible,  then,  at  such  a  transition  period  as 
the  present,  which,  just  because  it  is  a  transition 
period,  is  therefore  as  dangerous  to  a  nation  as  is  a 
flank-march  to  an  army — is  it  possible  to  form  any 
clear  conception  of  what  "Empire"  has  really 
always  meant  to  England,  whether  in  extreme  con- 
sciousness or  in  the  dark  unconscious?  Can  one 
define  with  any  precision  the  aims  which  British 
Imperialism  has  unconsciously  pursued  in  the  past, 
and  the  ends  which  it  more  or  less  consciously  pur- 
sues in  the  present? 

Let  me  illustrate  my  answer  by  an  incident  from 
Greek  history. '  On  the  night  before  Alexander  of 
Macedon  started  for  the  East  on  that  career  of 
conquest  in  which,  like  Achilles,  his  great  exemplar, 
he  was  to  find  his  glory  and  an  early  death,  he  had 
a  farewell  interview  with  the  man  who  had  been 
his  tutor,  now  the  master  of  a  rising  school  of 
thought  in  the  shades  of  the  Lyceum.  And  to- 
wards the  close  of  the  interview  Aristotle  said  to 
the  Macedonian : 

"You  are  about  to  start  upon  an  enterprise 
which  will  bring  you  into  many  lands  and  amongst 
many  nations,  some  already  celebrated  in  arts  and 
arms,  some  savage  and  unknown.  But  this  last 
counsel  I  give  you:  Whithersoever  your  victories 

1  [NOTE. — The  authority  for  this  incident  in  its  present  form  can- 
not be  traced;  but  as  Professor  Cramb  used  it  both  in  his  writings  and 
lectures  it  is  probable  that,  in  his  exceptionally  wide  studies  in  classi- 
cal literature,  he  had  come  across  it  in  some  little-known  author.] 


AIM  OF  BRITISH   IMPERIALISM      139 

lead  you,  never  forget  that  you  are  a  Greek,  and 
everywhere  draw  hard  and  fast  the  line  that 
separates  the  Greek  from  the  Barbarian. " 

"No,"  answered  the  youthful  conqueror — he 
was  barely  two-and-twenty — "I  will  pursue  an- 
other policy.  I  will  make  all  men  Hellenes.  That 
shall  be  the  purpose  of  my  victories. " 

The  wisdom  of  a  soldier  for  once  went  deeper 
than  the  wisdom  of  the  greatest  architect  of 
thought  that  Time  has  known. 

And  two  centuries  later  a  Greek  writer  gave 
definiteness  to  the  Macedonian's  reply  when  he 
described  the  influence  of  the  Greek  spirit  under  the 
Roman  dominion  as  tending  to  give  all  men  a 
Greek  mind,  to  give  all  men  the  power  to  look  at 
man's  life,  man's  actions,  man's  past  and  future, 
from  the  standpoint  of  the  Greek. 

In  the  same  manner,  if  I  were  asked  how  one 
could  describe  in  a  sentence  the  general  aim  of 
British  Imperialism  during  the  last  two  centuries 
and  a  half,  I  should  answer  in  the  spirit  of  Dionys- 
ius :  To  give  all  men  within  its  bounds  an  English 
mind;  to  give  all  who  come  within  its  sway  the 
power  to  look  at  the  things  of  man's  life,  at  the 
past,  at  the  future,  from  the  standpoint  of  an 
Englishman ;  to  diffuse  within  its  bounds  that  high 
tolerance  in  religion  which  has  marked  this  empire 
from  its  foundation;  that  reverence  yet  boldness 
before  the  mysteriousness  of  life  and  death, 
characteristic  of  our  great  poets  and  our  great 


140  PAST  AND   FUTURE 

thinkers ;  that  love  of  free  institutions,  that  pursuit 
of  an  ever-higher  justice  and  a  larger  freedom 
which,  rightly  or  wrongly,  we  associate  with  the 
temper  and  character  of  our  race  wherever  it  is 
dominant  and  secure.1 

That  is  the  conception  of  Empire  and  of  England 
which  persists  through  the  changing  fortunes  of 
parties  and  the  rise  and  fall  of  Cabinets.  It  out- 
lives the  generations.  Like  an  immortal  energy  it 
links  age  to  age.  This  undying  spirit  is  the  true 
England,  the  true  Britain,  for  which  men  strive 
and  suffer  in  every  zone  and  in  every  era,  which 
silently  controls  their  actions  and  shapes  their 
character  like  an  inward  fate — "England."  It  is 
this  which  gives  hope  in  hopeless  times,  imparting 

1  If  finally  I  were  asked  when  this  conception  of  empire  began 
to  take  imaginative  possession  of  the  mind  of  a  great  statesman, 
I  should  point,  perhaps  arbitrarily,  to  Cromwell.  And  I  should 
further  point  to  Edmund  Burke's  great  impeachment  of  Warren 
Hastings  in  1788  as  the  period  when,  from  being  the  possession  of 
statesmen,  it  becomes  the  possession  of  the  nation,  shaping  its 
counsels  henceforth.  For,  if  Burke  is  a  reactionary  in  constitu- 
tional politics,  in  his  impeachment  of  Hastings  he  is  the  prophet 
of  a  new  era,  the  enunciator  of  an  ideal  which  the  later  nineteenth 
century  slowly  endeavours  to  realize — an  empire  resting,  not  on 
violence,  but  on  justice  and  freedom.  That  impeachment  antici- 
pates our  present  policy  in  India  and  in  Egypt,  just  as  Burke's 
speeches  on  the  American  Colonies  anticipate  the  policy  which 
underlies  our  treatment  of  Canada,  Australia,  New  Zealand,  and 
South  Africa  at  the  present  day,  a  policy  which  has  almost 
reversed  an  article  of  faith  in  the  eighteenth  century — that  every 
colony  must,  in  the  long  run,  like  ripe  fruit,  detach  itself  from 
the  parent  stem. 


THE   SPIRIT-PURPOSE  141 

its  immortal  vigour  to  the  statesman  in  his  cabinet 
and  to  the  soldier  in  the  field.  A  government  or  a 
minister  may  seem  to  have  the  power  arbitrarily 
to  provoke  a  war  which  involves  the  suffering  and 
deaths  of  thousands;  but  it  is  neither  for  govern- 
ment nor  minister  that  the  soldier  falls.  Lying 
there  in  agony,  sinking  into  darkness,  he  has  in 
himself  the  consciousness  of  this  far  greater  thing, 
this  mysterious,  deathless,  onward-striving  force, 
call  it  God,  call  it  Destiny — but  name  it  England. 
For  England  it  is.  It  is  for  this  that  on  the  bat- 
tlefield the  soldier  fights,  in  victory  or  in  defeat. 
This  is  the  spirit-purpose  which  binds  century  to 
century,  making  the  yeoman  who  fought  to  estab- 
lish an  empire  on  the  fields  of  France  the  comrades 
in  purpose  of  the  mariners  who  founded  Virginia, 
of  those  adventurers  to  the  East  (themselves  the 
pioneers  of  the  soldiers  who,  under  Clive,  Hastings, 
Eyre  Coote,  Wellesley  and  Dalhousie,  founded 
our  empire  in  India),  or  of  those  adventurers, 
again,  who  settled  in  the  vast  loneliness  of  the 
island  continent  of  Australia. 

To  give  all  men  within  its  bounds  an  English 
mind — that  has  been  the  purpose  of  our  empire 
in  the  past.  He  who  speaks  of  England's  greatness 
speaks  of  this.  Her  renown,  her  glory,  it  is  this, 
undying,  imperishable,  in  the  strictest  sense  of 
that  word.  For  if,  in  some  cataclysm  of  Nature, 
these  islands  and  all  that  they  embrace  were  over- 
whelmed and  sunk  in  sea-oblivion,  if  to-morrow's 


142  PAST  AND   FUTURE 

sun  rose  upon  an  Englandless  world,  still  this  spirit 
and  this  purpose  in  other  lands  would  fare  on  un- 
touched amid  the  wreck. 

To  the  German  accusation  cited  in  the  opening 
lecture  that  in  India  England  has  made  no  new  ex- 
periment in  religion,  it  can  be  answered  that  more 
than  any  other  conqueror  of  India  she  has  per- 
mitted the  genius  of  its  race  to  continue  its  own 
developments,  that  religious  propagandism  has 
never  formed  part  of  her  political  creed.  She  has 
even,  at  stated  intervals,  checked  the  inopportune 
or  intemperate  zeal  of  missionaries  of  her  own  race. 
And  how  is  it  thinkable  that  an  English  Shah 
Jehan  should  ever  arise  to  imperil  by  bigotry  the 
continuance  of  the  British  Raj?  At  moments, 
indeed,  this  empire  seems  to  resemble  a  vast  temple, 
with  the  vaulted  skies  for  its  dome  and  the  viewless 
bounds  of  this  planet  for  its  walls.  And  within 
that  temple  what  prayers  arise,  in  every  accent, 
and  what  sound  of  hymns  to  every  god  that,  down 
the  long  centuries,  the  human  imagination  has 
created  or  adored! 

To  give  all  men  an  English  mind — that  ideal  has 
been  our  guiding  star  through  all  the  phases  of  our 
empire. 

".  .  .  Se  tu  segui  tua  stella' 
Non  puoi  fallire  a  glorioso  porto."1 

1  "If  thou  follow  but  thy  star 

Thou  shalt  not  fail  of  a  glorious  haven." 


THE   NEW   IMPERIAL   PROBLEM      143 

And,  until  now,  Dante's  noble  verse  has  been  most 
strangely,  most  greatly  realized  by  the  English. 
Who  shall  affirm  how  long  that  ideal  shall  yet 
govern  England's  actions? 

VI 

WITH  the  twentieth  century  England  has  reached  a 
stage  in  the  career  of  empire  when  her  policy, 
whatever  it  may  have  been  in  the  past,  becomes 
definitely  a  policy  of  peace,  not  war,  of  internal 
organization,  not  of  outward  expansion.  Eng- 
land's task  now,  that  is  to  say — if  there  were  no 
other  power  than  England — is  the  evolution,  not 
of  an  exterior  uniformity,  but  of  an  inner  harmony, 
the  organization  of  this  empire  that  we  already 
possess,  the  founding  of  an  imperially  representa- 
tive government.  New  problems  of  every  kind 
arising  from  within  her  own  bounds  are  pressing 
for  solution,  in  India,  in  Egypt,  in  Canada  and  in 
the  Southern  Seas.  How  is  the  central  government 
of  this  vast  and  complex  structure  of  empire  ul- 
timately to  be  organized?  Who  are  to  compose 
the  Imperial  Council  or  the  Imperial  Parliament? 
Upon  what  principle  are  its  members  to  be  elected, 
and  from  whom,  and  by  whom?  It  seems  as  if 
the  political  genius  of  the  nation  or  the  empire 
were  to  be  strained  to  create  not  only  a  new  school 
of  statesmen,  but  almost  a  new  statesmanship. 
The  problem  of  armaments,  due  to  the  transforma- 


144  PAST  AND   FUTURE 

tion  which  the  art  of  war  is  undergoing,  is  not  less 
pressing.  If  free  communities,  Canada,  Australia, 
New  Zealand,  South  Africa,  create  their  own 
armies  and  build  their  own  fleets,  who  is  to  have 
the  supreme  command  of  those  armies;  in  what 
docks  are  those  fleets  to  be  built;  by  whom  are 
they  to  be  manned;  and  what  is  to  be  the  part  of 
each  separate  State  or  unit  of  government  in  their 
control?  Is  it  conceivable,  if  those  very  principles 
which  have  made  England  an  empire  are  to  persist 
— the  larger  freedom,  the  higher  justice — is  it 
conceivable  that  these  organized  countries,  these 
States  already  numbering  some  fifteen  or  sixteen 
million  inhabitants,  will  be  content  to  supply  the 
means  of  peace  and  war  and  yet  have  no  voice 
whatever  in  the  decision  of  peace  and  war?  It  is 
absolutely  inconceivable.  And,  again,  there  is 
that  wider  and  still  more  intricate  problem  of 
India.  How  and  by  what  stretch  of  the  imagina- 
tion is  that  freedom  and  justice,  in  any  conscious 
or  self-governing  sense,  to  be  extended  to  India? 
And  to  that  problem  you  can  also  add  the  like 
problem  in  Egypt.  These  are  merely  the  central 
strands  of  a  complex  ganglion  of  questions  which, 
with  every  year  and  every  decade,  will  become 
more  pressing. 

Freedom  a  French  thinker  once  defined  as  the 
power  to  exercise  the  will  in  the  pursuit  of  its 
highest  ends  without  fear.  For  this  alone  gives  to 
the  mind  that  tranquillity,  that  "security,"  in  the 


"FRIENDLY   RIVALRY"  145 

strict  sense  of  the  word — immunity  from  cares — 
necessary  to  free  operations  of  the  great  faculties 
of  the  mind.  And  it  is  this  tranquillity,  this  se- 
curity, that  is  now  above  all  things  necessary  to 
England.  But  it  is  just  this  tranquillity,  this 
security,  which  she  cannot  find.  For  whilst  Eng- 
land may  pray  for  peace  in  order  to  shape  out -these 
problems  in  politics,  there  still  beyond  the  North 
Sea  is  the  stern  Watcher,  unsleeping,  unresting, 
bound  to  her  own  fate,  pursuing  her  own  distant 
goal  undeviatingly,  unfalteringly,  weighing  every 
action  of  England,  waiting  for  every  sign  of 
England's  weakness.  It  is  here  that  Germany's 
will  to  power  comes  into  tragic  conflict  with 
England's  will  to  peace.  Here  is  the  element  of 
discord — it  is  not  in  England  herself.  What  will 
be  the  issue? 

There  the  question  lies,  and  it  is  a  difficult 
question — more  difficult  for  a  German  than  for  an 
Englishman.  To  talk  about  "friendly  rivalry"  is 
no  answer.  I  never  can  understand  what  meaning 
that  kind  of  talk  has — "friendly  rivalry,"  "gener- 
ous emulation, "  and  the  image  of  racers  on  a  race- 
course. Even  if  such  a  thing  were  possible  or 
thinkable  among  nations — and  there  is  no  example 
in  history  of  any  such  "friendly  rivalry,"  of  any 
such  "generous  emulation" — but  even  if  it  were 
possible,  what  is  to  be  the  state  of  mind  of  a  young 
and  ardent  German  at  the  present  day  who  feels 
within  his  nation  very  nearly  an  unlimited  power, 


146  PAST   AND   FUTURE 

and  who  sees  only  one  great  adversary,  one  great 
obstacle,  between  him  and  the  realization  of  the 
world-ideal  of  his  race?  There  are  tens  of  thou- 
sands of  such  young  Germans.  What  are  you  or  I 
to  think  of  them  if  they  sit  still  and  fold  their 
hands — in  "friendly  rivalry,"  in  "generous  emula- 
tion" of  England,  a  Power  which  is  described  to 
them  by  their  leaders  and  thinkers  as  already 
tottering  to  its  grave?  What  other  spirit  is  to 
arise  within  them  than  the  spirit  which  I  have 
indicated  in  these  lectures? 

I  have  lived  amongst  Germans  and  know  some- 
thing of  the  temper  of  Germany's  manhood  and  of 
her  youth.  I  have  read  much  in  her  history  and  in 
her  literature.  I  have  been  impressed,  as  with  the 
motion  of  tides  and  of  great  rivers,  by  the  majesty 
of  that  movement  by  which,  from  the  days  of  the 
Saxon  and  the  Hohenstaufen  Emperors,  through 
centuries  of  feudal  anarchy  and  disintegration 
made  still  more  disintegrated  by  the  convulsive 
forces  of  the  fiercest  religious  strife,  she  has  at- 
tained to  her  position  to-day;  and  with  the  best 
will  in  the  world  I  can  see  no  issue  to  the  present 
collision  of  ideals  but  a  tragic  issue.  England, 
indeed,  desires  peace;  England,  indeed,  it  is  certain, 
will  never  make  war  upon  Germany;  but  how  is 
the  youth  of  Germany,  the  youth  of  that  nation 
great  in  arts  as  in  war,  to  acquiesce  in  the  world- 
predominance  of  England?  With  what  thoughts 
are  they  to  read  the  history  and  the  literature 


VALUE  OF  ALLIANCES  147 

of  their  country?  If,  from  love  of  peace  or  dread 
of  war,  Germany  submits,  it  would  seem  as  if  her 
great  soldiers  had  fought  in  vain,  as  if  the  long 
roll  of  her  battles  had  passed  like  an  empty  sound, 
as  if  the  Great  Elector  and  Frederick,  Stein  and 
Scharnhorst  and  Bismarck  had  schemed  in  vain, 
as  if  her  thinkers  had  thought  their  thoughts  and 
her  poets  had  dreamed  their  dreams  not  less  in 
vain.  But  if,  on  the  other  hand,  Germany  has 
not  declined  from  her  ancient  valour  the  issue  is 
certain,  and  a  speedy  issue. 

It  is  war. 

At  the  present  stage  of  world-history  it  is,  of 
course,  useless  to  seek  a  practical  policy  in  arbitra- 
tion. It  would  be  a  waste  of  words  even  to  demon- 
strate the  invalidity  of  this  device.  Nor  would  it 
be  more  opportune  to  discuss  the  value  of  alliances 
as  a  permanent  means  of  securing  the  peace  of 
Europe.  In  a  treaty  with  an  enemy  that  treaty 
is  binding  only  so  long  as  you  can  make  your 
enemy  see  gleam  behind  the  parchment  the  point 
of  a  sword ;  and  the  verdict  of  history  upon  alliances 
is  unmistakable  and  explicit.  Whatever  principle 
may  govern  individual  friendships,  alliances  be- 
tween nations  and  States  are  governed  by  self- 
interest  only;  they  are  valid  only  so  long  as  mutual 
fears  or  mutual  desires  persist  in  equal  force.  For 
the  friendship  of  nations  is  an  empty  name;  peace 
is  at  best  a  truce  on  the  battlefield  of  Time;  the 
old  myth  or  the  old  history  of  the  struggle  for 


148  PAST  AND   FUTURE 

existence  is  behind  us,  but  the  struggle  for  power 
— who  is  to  assign  bounds  to  its  empire,  or  invent 
an  instrument  for  measuring  its  intensity? 

In  this  country  we  seem  to  be  gradually  acquir- 
ing the  dangerous  habit  of  mind  of  trusting  to 
alliances  rather  than  to  our  own  strength.  A  great 
nation  trusts  to  itself  mainly;  only  secondarily  to 
alliances,  however  intimate.  For  deep  in  the  heart 
of  every  nation  lie  ancient,  strong  resentments, 
resentments  that  at  a  moment  of  crisis  may  flare 
up  into  ancient  strifes.  War  has  often  revealed 
antagonisms  between  powers  apparently  friendly, 
and  sympathies  between  powers  apparently  hostile. 
We  speak  much,  for  instance,  of  the  Triple  En- 
tente; but  of  how  long  standing  is  our  amity  with 
France,  and  upon  what  foundations  does  it  rest? 
Waterloo  is  not  yet  a  century  old,  and  Fashoda  is 
but  yesterday;  and  some  half  a  century  ago,  be- 
tween these  two  terms,  the  ignoble  terror  of  a 
French  invasion  created  the  absurd  Volunteer 
System  which  a  not  less  ignoble  terror  of  Germany 
has  recently  transformed  into  the  still  more  ab- 
surd Territorial  Force.  And  Russia?  At  the 
present  hour  Germany  seems  in  a  state  of  dull 
hostility  towards  Russia,  England  in  a  state  of 
very  dull  friendship  with  the  same  power.  Eng- 
land, with  her  ancient  dreams,  her  ancient  tradi- 
tions and  ideals  of  the  higher  freedom,  the  larger 
justice,  summons  the  aid  of  Russia  to  help  her  to 
govern,  or  misgovern,  Persia!  How  can  we  hope 


WAR  OR  SUBMISSION  149 

that  such  an  alliance,  so  unnaturally  framed,  will 
last?  Does  it  not  contain  within  itself  the  very 
seeds  of  its  own  destruction?  And  along  the 
northern  shore  of  the  Persian  Gulf  or  on  the 
Afghan  frontier  we  have  with  our  own  hands  laid 
a  mine  which  might  at  any  moment  shatter  the 
fabric  to  pieces.  He  who  cannot  take  within  his 
range  a  prostrate  France  and  the  alliance  of  Russia 
and  Germany  against  England  is  not  a  student  of 
politics,  whatever  else  he  may  be. 

There  is  possible  perhaps  for  England  another 
course  than  the  arbitrament  of  war.  Avoiding  war 
and  tacitly  acquiescing  in  the  r61e  of  submission, 
England  may  adopt  a  policy  of  concession  to  an 
enemy  whom  she  dreads,  and,  one  diplomatic 
defeat  leading  to  another,  she  may  gradually  sink 
to  a  secondary  place  in  the  councils  of  Europe  and 
of  the  world.  In  such  a  process  there  need  be 
nothing  that  is  crudely  disgraceful,  nothing  to 
sting  to  the  quick  the  honour  of  opportunist 
Cabinets  or  publicists.  The  concessions  would  be 
made  at  moderately  wide  intervals,  and  a  people 
sunk  of  itself  in  torpor  and  indifference  can  easily 
be  lulled  by  the  ministerial  management  of  words 
and  events.  Everyday  life  would  go  on  as  before; 
strikes  would  increase  in  number  and  the  pillage 
of  capital  be  accelerated;  sloth  would  settle  ever 
deeper  on  every  class,  and,  as  in  the  Byzantium  of 
the  thirteenth  century,  the  vanity  of  a  decrepit 
people  would  exhibit  itself  in  complacent  ostenta- 


150  PAST   AND   FUTURE 

tion.  Thus  indeed  the  fate  of  England  would 
resemble  the  fate  of  Venice  in  the  sixteenth  cen- 
tury, until  some  soldier,  more  cynical  or  more 
brutal  in  his  ambition,  would  affix  a  term  to  her 
sham  independence,  as  at  Campo  Formio  Napoleon 
ended  the  sham  independence  of  Venice. 

But  is  the  creative  power  which  has  shaped  this 
ancient  and  famous  empire  really  dead?  Is  it 
moribund,  or  sick  at  all,  within  us?  Or  is  this 
momentary  apathy  and  indifference  a  thing  indeed 
momentary,  that  shall  pass  away? 

Even  now,  even  in  1913,  when  I  consider  Eng- 
land and  this  vast  and  complex  fabric  of  empire 
which  she  has  slowly  reared,  its  colonies,  its  de- 
pendencies, the  cosmic  energy  which  everywhere 
seems  to  animate  the  mass  in  its  united  life  and  in 
its  separate  States  or  principalities,  all  such  com- 
parisons with  decaying  empires  appear  an  irrele- 
vance or  a  futility.  Whatever  be  England's  fate, 
it  will  not  be  the  fate  of  Venice  or  Byzantium. 
And  as  a  proof  of  the  validity  of  this  impression  or 
this  conviction  I  seem  to  discover  everywhere 
stirrings  as  of  a  new  life,  to  hear  the  tramp  of 
armies  fired  by  a  newer  chivalry  than  that  of  Crecy, 
and  on  the  horizon  to  discern  the  outline  of  fleets 
manned  by  as  heroic  a  resolve  as  were  those  of 
Nelson  or  Rodney. 

England  till  now  has  known  nothing  of  her 
danger.  Democratic  England  has  known  nothing 
of  war.  The  full  enfranchisement  of  the  English 


HOPE  AND   DEMOCRACY  151 

nation  dates  only  from  1867  and  1885,  and  since 
1867  what  danger  or  what  war  upon  a  large  scale 
has  the  enfranchised  democracy  experienced?  But 
will  not  the  democracy  gradually  understand  that 
its  own  power  and  its  own  privileges  depend  upon 
the  extent  to  which  it  takes  upon  itself  not  only 
the  rights  but  the  duties  and  responsibilities  of 
those  who  have  preceded  it  in  the  government  of 
these  islands;  of  the  feudal  barons  who  not  merely 
fronted  King  John  at  Runnymede  but  led  the 
charge  on  the  fields  of  France  from  Cregy  to 
Castillon;  of  the  merchant-class  who,  in  the  six- 
teenth, seventeenth,  and  eighteenth  centuries, 
rivalling  in  enterprise  and  daring  the  feudal 
leaders  of  an  earlier  time,  outlined  the  wide  bounds 
of  our  empire  in  the  sunrise  and  in  the  sunset?  .  .  . 

[NOTE. — The  paragraph  is  unfinished.  The  lecturer 
must  have  intended  to  refer  to  the  government  and 
electorate  which  conducted  and  supported  the  war 
against  Napoleon.] 

But  in  this  is  one's  final  hope:  that  the  English 
nation  and  race  as  a  whole  shall  gradually  perceive 
that  if  the  task  of  internal  organization  is  ever  to 
be  carried  out  in  that  tranquillity  and  security  of 
spirit  which  is  necessary  for  all  high  tasks  in  poli- 
tics, England  must  take  upon  herself  the  fulfilment 
of  her  destiny,  depending  upon  herself  alone  for 
the  realization  of  a  destiny  that  is  her  destiny. 


152  PAST  AND  FUTURE 

[NOTE. — It  was  the  author's  intention  to  end  the  book 
with  a  fuller  development  of  this  theme  of  England 
and  her  destiny  than  was  possible  in  the  lecture. 
No  notes  for  this  intended  close  of  the  book  exist 
except  the  following  fragment.] 

And  if  the  dire  event  of  a  war  with  Germany — if 
it  is  a  dire  event — should  ever  occur,  there  shall  be 
seen  upon  this  earth  of  ours  a  conflict  which,  be- 
yond all  others,  will  recall  that  description  of  the 
great  Greek  wars: 

"Heroes  in  battle  with  heroes, 
And  above  them  the  wrathful  gods." 

And  one  can  imagine  the  ancient,  mighty  deity  of 
all  the  Teutonic  kindred,  throned  above  the  clouds, 
looking  serenely  down  upon  that  conflict,  upon  his 
favourite  children,  the  English  and  the  Germans, 
locked  in  a  death-struggle,  smiling  upon  the  hero- 
ism of  that  struggle,  the  heroism  of  the  children  of 
Odin  the  War-god! 


r  j  7/E  following  pages  contain 
•*  descriptions  of  books  dealing 
with  various  phases  of  the  different 
countries  invoiced  in  the  European 
War.  They  are  of  the  most 
timely  interest  and  of  unusual  value. 


The    German    Enigma 

An  Inquiry  Among  the  Germans 

What  They  Think— What  They  Want 
What  They  Can  Do 

By  Georges  Bordon 
Translated  by  Beatrice  Marshall 

M.  BORDON,  a  sub-editor  of  Figaro,  was  sent  by  that  journal 
to  make  a  careful  attempt  "to  get  at  Germany  as  she  actually 
is,"  and  here  presents  his  results. 

"  I  made  a  great  effort  to  shake  off  and  cast  from  me  all  my 
preconceived  opinions  .  .  .  Among  the  personages  I  interviewed 
were  politicians,  professors,  military  men,  financiers,  diplomatists, 
artists,  manufacturers,  solicitors,  and  officials;  any  one,  in  fact, 
who  was  likely  to  throw  light  on  the  character,  temperament, 
and  moral  tendencies  of  modern  Germany." 

The  subject  of  his  conversations  was  always  the  relations 
between  France  and  Germany;  the  significance  of  the  Agadir 
incidents;  the  attitude  of  the  press  and  public  opinion;  the 
sources  of  bitterness  on  both  sides;  and,  above  all,  the  signs  of 
the  future.  He  talked  in  turn  with  von  Kiderlen  Waecnt;er,  the 
Foreign  Minister,  Herr  Kamp,  President  of  the  Reichstag,  Pro- 
fessor von  Schmoller  and  Adolph  von  Wagner;  with  the  great 
landowners,  Prince  Hatzfeldt,  Prince  Lichnowsky;  with  the 
editor,  Theodor  Wolff,  with  Herr  von  Sudermann,  with  Gen. 
Keim,  President  of  the  Military  League,  and  with  famous  states- 
men and  financiers. 

And  everywhere  the  attitude  of  individuals  seemed  to  hold  a 

gjlden  promise   of  a  better  understanding    between  France, 
ritain,  and  Germany,  natural  allies  against  the  Slav. 

Cloth,  net,  $1.25 

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Publishers      681   5th  Ave.       New  York 


Modern  Germany 

Her  Political  and  Economic  Problems,  Her  Foreign 

and  Domestic  Policy,  Her  Ambitions,  and  the 

Causes  of  Her  Successes  and  of  Her 

Failures 

By  J.  Ellis  Barker 

Fourth  and  very  greatly  enlarged  Edition 


'  I  'HE  fourth  edition  of  Modern  Germany  is  an  important  book 
*•  for  two  reasons:  It  contains  over  two  hundred  pages  of 
new  matter;  and  it  describes  more  definitely  than  did  the  three 
preceding  editions  the  points  in  which  Germany  fails.  The 
new  chapters  treat  of  Russo-German  relations,  the  Triple  Alli- 
ance, Germany's  policy  toward  Great  Britain,  the  Moroccan 
Crisis  of  1911,  the  Reichstag  Election  of  1912,  and  German  in- 
dustrial conditions. 

The  book  is  both  readable  and  thorough;  nothing  yet  published 
gives  so  adequate  an  idea  of  Germany's  relations,  up  to  the  war, 
with  Russia,  France,  Great  Britain,  Austria-Hungary,  and  the 
Netherlands,  or  so  fully  describes  her  resources,  the  development 
of  her  industries,  and  the  character  of  the  world-policy  which 
men  like  Professor  Treitschke  have  impressed  upon  the  leaders 
of  this  generation. 


Cloth,  8vo,  net,  $3.00 

*, 

E.  P.  Dutton  &  Company 

Publishers      681  5th  Ave.      New  York 


A  History  of  Russia 

By  V.  O.  Kluchevsky 

Late  Professor  of  Russian  History  in  the  University  of  Moscow 
In  Thee  Volumes.    Translated  by  C.  J.  Hogarth 

HPHIS  work  covers  that  most  important  part  of  Russia's  his- 
*•  tory  in  which  she  was  most  herself — the  years  before  she 
began  to  yield  to  the  influence  of  the  western  nations  with  whom 
she  had  been  long  in  contact.  For  any  understanding  of  the 
origins  of  Russian  institutions  and  of  the  fundamental  charac- 
teristics of  her  people  it  is  indispensable,  and  for  the  later  years 
is  ably  supplemented  by  Prof.  Mayor's  work.  Of  the  periods 
covered  it  makes  the  most  detailed  and  thorough  study.  It  is 
the  only  complete  history  of  those  times. 

"One  of  the  best  historical  works  published  in  any  language 
in  recent  years  is  this  history  of  Russia,  by  the  late  Professor 
Kluchevsky  of  the  University  of  Moscow.  For  this  is  not  a 
simple  narrative  of  political  or  international  happenings  but  a 
remarkable  study  of  Russian  social,  economic,  and  international 
history  based  upon  years  of  personal  research  in  the  available 
historical  sources  of  the  subject.  Instead  of  the  conventional 
and  somewhat  disconnected  chronicle  by  Rombaud,  we  have 
here  a  work  that  not  only  approaches  the  subject  from  a  new 
and  original  point  of  view  but  reveals  in  every  chapter  a  famili- 
arity with  and  an  assimilation  of  the  sources  for  Russian  history 
that  compels  attention  and  interest.  .  .  .  Prof.  Kluchevsky 's 
interpretations  are  always  ready  and  his  generalizations  on  the 
tendencies  in  Russian  history  at  different  periods  are  often 
startling  in  their  sweep  and  boldness." 

From  a  Review  in  the  Annals  of  the  American  Academy, 
by  WILLIAM  E.  LINGELBACH,  University  of  Pennsylvania, 

Three  Volumes.     Cloth,  net,  $7J)0 

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An   Economic    History 
of   Russia 

By  James  Mavor,  Ph.D. 

Professor  of  Political  Economy  in  the  University  of  Toronto 


"  Mr.  Mavor,  who  is  Professor  of  Political  Economy  in  the 
University  of  Toronto,  has  made  a  careful  and  profound  study 
of  his  subject;  has  availed  himself  of  every  accessible  source  of 
information,  in  the  Russian  language  as  well  as  in  French,  Ger- 
man, and  English;  has  had  the  assistance  of  able  Russian  ad- 
visers and  collaborators;  and  has  devoted  more  than  seven  years 
to  his  task.  .  .  . 

"  One  might  read  everything  that  is  available  in  English, 
from  the  first  edition  of  Wallace's  '  Russia '  to  the  articles  on 
Russia  in  the  eleventh  edition  of  the  '  Encyclopaedia  Britannica,' 
without  finding  anything  so  accurate,  comprehensive,  and 
illuminating.  .  .  . 

"  In  view  of  the  momentous  struggle  recently  begun  in  Europe, 
and  the  part  that  Russia  must  inevitably  play  in  it,  Professor 
Mavor's  book  has  an  importance  that  it  might  not  have  perhaps 
in  time  of  peace;  but  in  any  circumstances  and  under  any  con- 
ditions it  is  likely  to  stand  for  many  years  as  the  best  economic 
and  political  history  of  the  Russian  Empire  that  is  accessible 
to  English  readers." — From  an  extended  review  in  The  Outlook. 

"  Rarely  has  there  been  written  in  the  English  tongue  a  his- 
tory of  economic  and  political  progress  so  dispassionate,  so 
scholarly,  so  just." — New  York  Times. 

In  Two  8vo  volumes,  $JO.OO  net 

E.  P.  Dutton  &  Company 

Publishers      681  5th  Ave.      New  York 


Modern  England 

A  Historical  and  Sociological  Study 
By  Louis  Cazamian 

Lecturer  at  the  Sorbonne 

An  essay  in  the  philosophy  of  history,  tracing  a  picture  of 
England  of  to-day  by  showing  the  main  lines  along  which  the 
facts  of  her  development  may  be  grouped,  and  by  stating  the 
most  important  of  the  problems  which  confront  her  with  the  reme- 
dies which  have  been  tried  or  proposed. 

It  is  remarkable  that  no  book  by  any  English  writer  has 
treated  a  subject  vitally  interesting  to  Englishmen  so  compre- 
hensively and  fully  as  it  has  been  handled  by  Mons.  Cazamian 
writing  for  Frenchmen. 

Cloth,  net,  $150 

France  To-Day 

Its  Religious  Orientation 
By  Paul  Sabatier 

"  To  understand  and  reflect  the  mind  of  a  whole  people,  even 
on  such  a  sectional  aspect  of  it  as  its  religion,  is  not  an  easy  task. 
But  there  is  no  man  better  fitted  by  nature  and  training  to  do 
so  than  Paul  Sabatier.  The  reader's  attention  is  directed  to  the 
book  both  as  a  means  of  stimulating  interest  in  a  living  subject, 
and  as  a  means  of  measurably  gratifying  that  interest." — Homi- 
letic  Review. 

M.  Sabatier  is  a  Protestant  of  Huguenot  ancestry,  whose 
studies  of  mediaeval  Catholicism  have  developed  a  broad  sym- 
pathy with  all  that  is  best  in  the  Roman  church.  Add  to  this 
his  special  studies  of  Modernism,  and  it  is  easy  to  account  for 
the  unusual  scope  of  his  vision. 

Cloth,  net,  $2.00 

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England  and  the  Orleans 
Monarchy 

By  Major  John  Hall 

Author  of  "The  Bourbon  Restoration" 

A  history  of  the  troubled  years  from  1830  to  1848, 
during  which  Belgium  was  created  an  independent 
state,  the  first  entente  cordiale  developed  between 
England  and  France,  and  the  unrest  of  Europe  cul- 
minated in  war  and  revolution. 

The  kingdom  of  the  Netherlands  created  by  the 
Congress  of  Vienna  had  never  been  a  success,  the 
Dutch  and  Belgians  could  not  agree,  but  the  selection 
of  a  sovereign  for  the  new  state  was  a  matter  vital  to 
the  interests  of  the  five  Powers  whose  negotiations 
Major  Hall  describes  at  length.  No  arrangement 
which  might  in  future  lead  to  the  union  of  Belgium 
with  either  Prussia  or  France  could  be  permitted  by 
England.  Her  memory  of  Bonaparte's  reported  de- 
sire to  possess  Antwerp,  "as  a  pistol  held  at  England's 
head,"  was  still  too  clear.  Neutral  Belgium  must  be, 
even  at  the  price  of  war. 

Cloth,  net,  $4.00 
E.  P.  Dutton  &   Company 

Publishers       681   5th  Ave.       New  York 


Common  Sense  in  Foreign 
Policy 

By  Sir  Harry  Johnston 

Illustrated  with  Eight  Maps  by  the  Author  and  by  Dr.  J.  G.  Bartholomew 

An  indispensable  book  to  those  forecasting  the  coming  recon- 
struction of  European  affairs,  since  it  gives,  in  the  most  concise 
and  readable  form,  the  actual  position  of  each  of  the  great 
Powers  at  the  time  the  war  broke  out.  It  describes  their  in- 
ternal conditions,  actual  colonial  possessions,  and  territorial 
ambitions. 

"  Probably  one  of  the  strongest  forces  on  the  side  of  a  nobler 
foreign  policy  would  be  a  better  training  of  the  democracies  of 
the  world  in  the  geography  and  history  of  empire,  a  training  to 
which  this  volume  is  a  valuable  contribution." — The  Independent. 

Cloth,  net,  $1.25 


A  Literary  and  Historical 
Atlas  of  Europe 

By  J.  G.  Bartholomew 

Of  the  Geographical  Institute,  Edinburgh 

06  Pages   of   Colored  Maps  and   32   Pages  of   Maps  in   Line.     Physical, 
Historical,  and  Literary.     With  Index  and  Full  Gazetteer 

Supplied  in  the  four  bindings  of 

Everyman's  Library 


Cloth 

35  cents 

act 


Bancroft  do, 
reinforced 
50c,  net 


Red 
Leather 
70c.  net 


Quarter 

Pigskin 

$1,00  net 


There  are  no  better  maps  than  those  of  the  famous  geogra- 
pher, J.  G.  Bartholomew,  and  the  form  in  which  they  are  bound 
is  especially  convenient. 


E.  P.  Dutton  &  Company 

Publishers      681   5th  Ave.       New  York 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  AT  LOS  ANGELES 

THE  UNIVERSITY  LIBRARY 
This  book  is  DUE  on  the  last  date  stamped  below 


'  / 1 
LD-URL 


2  2  1986 


AUGIO 


Form  L-9 
aom-l,' 41(1122) 


IT  SOUTHERN  REGIONAL  LIBRARY  FACILITY 


A  001205668    5 


3  1158  01277  4351 


